Thanks, Dad. To his credit, he had also advised me to cultivate a mechanic at a local gas station. But out in the country there were no gas stations—just a pump at Marble’s Store, where you could leave the keys in the car and Marble would move it if it was in the way. So I registered for an adult-education class in auto mechanics one night a week at the local high school. On the first night, the auto-mechanics teacher used a word I had never understood the meaning of: “gasket.” I had blown one once, on a friend’s car, driving too fast on hair-raising canyon roads in Utah, and I knew that it cost a lot to replace, and the car was never the same. (Sorry!) Now, at last, I was going to find out what a gasket was. So I raised my hand and asked, “What’s a gasket?” The teacher, who looked like a used-car salesman, defined “gasket” by using three other words that I didn’t know the meaning of: “crankcase,” “pistons,” “carburetor” . . . I’m still not sure what a gasket is.
Grammar also has some intimidating terms, and grammarians throw them around constantly, but you don’t need to know them in order to use the language (“You put the key in the ignition and you turn it”). E. B. White admitted that before working on The Elements of Style he was the kind of writer who did not have “any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.” To understand how the language works, though—to master the mechanics of it—you have to roll up your sleeves and join the ink-stained wretches as we name the parts, being careful to define them in a way that makes them simpler instead of more complicated, and see how they work together. Bear with me while I find the little hook that holds the hood in place and prop it open with this stick. I am going to attempt to diagnose one of the most barbaric habits in contemporary usage.
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Just between you and me, I suffer, and the whole body of the English language shudders, when, say, a shoe salesman trying to gain my trust leans forward and says, “Between you and I . . .” Or when a character in a movie complains to a girl that “it’s just not right, lumping you and I together,” or when the winner of the Academy Award for best actress thanks a friend “for getting Sally and I together.” Maybe it’s the heat of the moment: maybe people think “me” might be OK at home, where you can afford to be a bit vulgar, but it can’t possibly be right in a formal setting.
Sticklers have been complaining about this for centuries, but we’ll go back only to Dwight Macdonald, who, in his 1961 essay on Webster’s Third, referred to “between you and I” as a widespread and well-known solecism. (“Solecism” is a fancy word for mistake; it refers especially to mistakes in usage that betray the user’s pomposity and ignorance.) David Foster Wallace lists “between you and I” second in a catalogue of blunders that prefaces his essay “Authority and American Usage,” a review of Garner’s Modern American Usage. Wallace was a fabulous stickler—a snoot, in his own term. (His mother was an English teacher.) Fortunately, he had the gift of writing cutting-edge prose with exquisite propriety, and so he makes it OK to care about such things. Garner himself devotes a column and a half to “between you and I,” noting that this is a grammatical error “committed almost exclusively by educated speakers trying a little too hard to sound refined but stumbling badly.”
This kind of thing occurs all the time. On an old episode of The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden has jilted Ed Norton and found another bowling partner, and says to Norton, “We have already reserved that alley for Teddy and I.” Ralph is trying to show his superiority. He’s not the most articulate guy (humminna-humminna-humminna-humminna), but by putting the other person first—“you,” Sally, Teddy—he and the others have let word order trick them into using the wrong pronoun.