There is something called a transitive verb. The word “transitive” leaves me cold. I wish there were another word for it. It is from the Latin, but don’t panic. We know enough English words with Latin roots to infer that trans means “across” or “through,” as in “transmit” (to put across) or “translucent” (allowing light to go through); the Central Park transverse carries you through or across Central Park. This kind of verb transfers (bears across) some kind of activity from the subject to another noun, not so closely identified with the subject, called the object. “The mechanic inspects the car.” “The car fails inspection.” “The engine needs oil.” The transitive verb points forward to something, to whatever will fulfill it. What object did the mechanic inspect? The car. What did the car fail? The inspection. What does the engine need? Oil. These nouns are direct objects of the verbs, and when a noun functions as an object it is in the objective case. The Latin for this is “accusative,” as in “I accused the mechanic of overcharging me.” “Accusative” is a word you see a lot of if you study a foreign language, which I recommend. I never learned any of this stuff until I studied German in my senior year of college.
Why am I telling you this? Because other languages, including German, Greek, and Latin, have the accusative case, and in some of these languages (notably Greek, German, Latin, and Irish) nouns take a different form depending on whether they are subjects or objects. Grammarians call these forms inflections. Also, some other languages have three, four, five, seven, fifteen different cases, and not just the nouns but everything that goes with them—articles, adjectives—has to be inflected to match. In English, we are mostly spared this bother. Only the pronouns, our ancient, venerable pronouns, are inflected in ways that link us to the Anglo-Saxons. Moreover, because our pronouns behave in some of the same ways that nouns and pronouns behave in other languages, the case system connects English to other languages—to Portuguese and Dutch and Latin and ancient Greek—making us a part of global history.
We learn, stumblingly, as children how to inflect pronouns. “Her is a sweetheart” is perfectly good baby talk. I have a friend in Queens who says things like “Me and him are going away for the weekend.” Good for her! This is not what I am trying to correct. I am not trying to fit anyone for a linguistic straitjacket. Strictly speaking, the copulative verb calls for the nominative case in the predicate. The subjective, or nominative, pronouns are: I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they. So the child eventually learns to say of his little sister, “She is a sweetheart” (probably by that time he doesn’t think so anymore, though). Helen Stark, my boss in the editorial library, calling her husband, Ira, from work, would announce herself by saying, “Hi, it’s I.” This shows what stern stuff Helen was made of. When my friend Diane was looking for her sunglasses and phrased her question “Are those they?,” it may have made her son laugh, but it would have gladdened the hearts of her teachers at Brearley. And when Mr. Burns, on The Simpsons, finds out that Homer’s father, Abe Simpson, used to wrestle under the name Glamorous Godfrey, and shouts “You were he!” his excellent grammar marks him as a villain.
By the way, there are verbs that do not take an object and are not copulative. Intransitive verbs reflect back on the subject. While a transitive verb directs the action of the subject onto an object, the intransitive verb expresses some action purely of the subject itself: “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.” “The self-driving car took off by itself.” “The little dog laughed to see such a sight.” The copulative verb is an intransitive verb (it doesn’t take an object) that belongs to a special high-performance category. In The Transitive Vampire, Karen Elizabeth Gordon supplies a list of copulative verbs: in addition to forms of the verb “to be,” they include “verbs of the senses (look, hear, taste, smell, sound); and verbs like appear, seem, become, grow, prove, remain.” It is because these verbs are copulative and not merely intransitive that we say something “tastes good” (an adjective), not “well” (an adverb): the verb is throwing the meaning back onto the noun, and nouns are modified by adjectives, not adverbs. It’s “I felt bad,” not “I felt badly,” because “to feel badly” would mean “to grope about ineptly.” The verb “felt”—definitely a verb of the senses, though not on Gordon’s list—fuses the “bad” to the subject, rather than simply using an adverb to modify itself.
One might reasonably ask, if we can use the objective for the subjective, as in “It’s me again,” why can’t we use the subjective for the objective? Grammar is a little like a plumbing system. Some systems are designed to dispose of two-ply toilet paper. Others are more delicate and are designed with the capacity for one-ply. You can flush one-ply in a system built for two-ply, but if you force two-ply into a system that tolerates only one-ply, you’re asking for trouble.