Or think of the song “The Girl from Ipanema.” I don’t know the lyrics in Portuguese (it’s Brazilian, of course), but this gentle bossa nova, in the famous English version sung by Astrud Gilberto, has a pronoun in it that I’ve always found distracting. A man watches a beautiful girl pass daily on her way to the sea; he loves her, but “she looks straight ahead—not at he.” Yowch. What went wrong here? Can’t a stickler kick back with a caipiri-nha for a little easy listening? Many more people have enjoyed the song than have gritted their teeth over it. I asked a linguist, and she said, “I always thought it was a joke.” It turns out that someone else who gritted his teeth over it was Norman Gimbel, the author of the English version, who had written, “She looks straight ahead, not at me.” It was the singer who substituted the “he,” perhaps in an attempt to adjust the lyrics to her own gender (the song was written to be sung by a man, after all), and without total mastery of English. At any rate, the consensus seems to be that nothing, but nothing, can diminish the charms of the girl from Ipanema.
“Those are they” or “not at he” might make some people smile, but I keep wondering: Why do we care? Is it just what we’re used to? Are we protecting our delicate sensibilities? You can’t even warn kids that unless they get their pronouns straight they can’t grow up to be president, because our most eloquent president in decades, Barack Obama, says things like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.” I got excited when I read this passage in Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: “The woman remained in the car the whole time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.)” Way to go, Gillian Flynn! I thought. May you sell as many billions of books as McDonald’s sells burgers! Later I realized that it was the character’s thought, not the author’s (although it may also be hers), and the character turned out to be just the sort of uptight entitled snob who gives good grammar a bad name.
So it may be quixotic of me, the battle may well have long been lost, but I am going to “requeft once for all,” as Noah Webster would say, “that it may be attended to.” Why exactly is “between you and me” correct, and “between you and I” wrong? Sometimes if you take your time and sort out the parts of speech and learn the pattern of the grammar, and see the beauty and the economy of it, you’ll find it easier to nail the usage.
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We’re going to start with the verb “to be,” move to the transitive verbs, take on the nouns that come before and after the verbs, and tinker with the prepositions attached to the nouns and verbs: it’s all about function in a sentence. This is applied mechanics.
The most important verb is the verb “to be” in all its glory: am, are, is, was, were, will be, has been. Grammarians know it as the copulative verb. (Many grammarians prefer “linking verb,” but I have to say that the term “copulative verb” impressed me when I heard it for the first time, in a linguistics course during my junior year of college. It was my first inkling that English grammar could be interesting.) The function of the copulative verb is to fit nouns together, to conjoin them as a plumber fits pipes, screwing the male into the female (these are actual terms from plumbing), to make the two one. The copulative verb functions almost as an equal sign: “I am a copy editor.” “My plumber is a saint.” “You are the reader.”
The nouns and pronouns in those simple sentences (I, you, copy editor, plumber, saint, reader) all fall into the same grammatical category. In grammar, the role that a noun (or its avatar the mighty pronoun) plays in the sentence is called its “case.” The noun that is the subject (I, my plumber, you) is in the subjective case and the noun that it links to (copy editor, saint, reader) through the verb is also in the subjective case. That is the power of the copulative verb. (I get so mad when the verb “is” or “be” is left lowercase in a title. Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s not important!) The Latinate term for subjective is nominative, which is easy even if you don’t know Latin, because to nominate, in English, is to name and a noun is always the name of something. But not all verbs can be the verb “to be” (although there are some that behave the same way), and nouns don’t always stay in the subjective case. It all depends on the model of the sentence.