by Rafaël Newman
Language changes. And I’m fine with that, particularly since it wouldn’t make any difference if I weren’t. I have made my peace with the attrition of the oblique case of the interrogative pronoun—“Who to follow”1 instead of whom; with the replacement of the subjunctive by the indicative in result clauses—“Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the enslaved in general,”2 rather than provide, to express a hoped-for outcome; with the transformation of i-a-u ablauts (ring-rang-rung, sink-sank-sunk) into semi-deponent verbs—“For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound,”3 where the past participle is used instead of sank, the simple past; by the extension of the subjective “suspicious” to cover the objective “suspect”—a suspicious person is now not so much the one who harbors a suspicion of foul play, as the one who is suspected of it (no examples needed here; simply round up the usual suspects).
I can intuit the unconscious force behind such deformations, all of which perform the characteristic work of linguistic development: which is to simplify by removing or replacing forms no longer required for disambiguation, or whose vestigial inflection remains stranded after the tide has borne out most of their company (as in the case of whom, in the mostly no longer inflected idiom of modern English).
What I cannot bring myself to accept, however, whether in common speech or in (astonishingly) unedited written accounts, is the creeping use of the nominative “I” in compound objects (“Susan and I”), both direct and indirect, where the oblique “me” (that is, the accusative or dative form of the word) would be reflexively supplied were the object used by the speaker in uncompounded form. As in the following utterance, reported online during last year’s US presidential election:
The ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff on Wednesday defended Vice President Kamala Harris against sexist criticisms about her lack of biological children, calling them “baseless” and expressing her gratitude for the presumptive Democratic nominee. “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN.
Would Kerstin Emhoff have been likely to say, “a co-parent with I and Doug” rather than “with me and Doug”? More to the point, if Doug were not in the picture at all, would she ever have said (and would the journalist have faithfully transcribed) “a co-parent with I” rather than “with me”? What is it about the first-person pronoun in such collective collocations that causes speakers of English to override its otherwise automatic inflection? Or rather, why is the nominative form “I” allowed to persist, ungrammatically, in constructions in which it is shielded from direct contact with the verb or preposition that governs it, that part of speech which would under other circumstances render it—oblige it to become—oblique?
My suspicion (because I am suspicious, not suspect) is that the reluctance to use the form “me” correctly—when the speaker can get away with it—derives from the admonition, heard early in life, to say “I,” which is considered more proper and polite, rather than the emphatic “me”. As when a child responds to the question, “Who wants ice cream?” with the cry “Me, me, me!”—and their parent chides them: “No, we say ‘I do.’”
In this manner, the word “me” becomes encoded as appetitive, infantile, vulgar—and thus shameful, to be avoided, if at all possible, in favor of the more proper “I”. This in spite of the fact that “I” is one of the weakest morphemes in the English language, composed as it is of a single vowel, which orthography renders it virtually unique, alongside the indefinite article “a” and the vocative particle “O” (which in any case is typically written “Oh,” as in “Oh, Susanna”), and thus susceptible to replacement by a more robust form when it appears alone. “I” lacks substance to such a degree that it is written with an invariable majuscule, as if to lend it extra corporeal presence: a mannerism held over from our Germanic past—although not even German has felt the need to capitalize its first-person nominative pronoun (“ich”), presumably since that word, however diminutive it may be, being composed of a vowel and a consonant evidently has sufficient body not to require orthographic prosthesis.
The French language, the other major forebear of English, has a similarly puny first-person pronoun, and its speakers thus display no compunction using the more substantive form “moi” to stand in for the weak “je” when required for emphasis. As in the idiom “moi, personellement,” to introduce a personal opinion. Indeed, Lacan’s translation of Freud’s term “ego” (or rather, of Freud’s ordinary German word “ich” to denote that element of his tripartite model of the psyche: James Strachey innovated the Latinate term “ego”) is in fact “le moi”. And “moi” seems to have developed as a special emphatic version of the weak French first-person pronoun, a supplement or replacement for the oblique form “me,” which is in French itself so feeble that it is characteristically elided, when, as often occurs, it appears before a vowel: “Il m’a accompagné.” In any case, a French-speaker would certainly never be likely to say, much less write, “Pendant plus que 10 ans, depuis l’adolescence de Cole et Ella, Kamala a été une co-parente avec Doug et je.”
In contemporary English, meanwhile, the peculiar habit is widespread, with people writing to online grammar sites wondering whether it mightn’t actually be possible to form a genitive by adding an apostrophe “s” to the nominative pronoun, to create the wholly unnecessary neologism “John and I’s wedding”. A corollary to the reluctance to use the word “me” is the use of the reflexive pronoun “myself” in collective objects: “He told it to John and myself.” This displays the same intention as the French “moi,” to fortify or supplement the weak “me,” but is not as endemic a scourge as the accusative “I,” nor as painful to the ear (and eye).
And I suppose I shall have to accustom myself to this evolution as well, since it doubtless keeps pace with another, more baleful and vastly more powerful political trend: away from the collective, towards the individual. The rejection of oblique inflection by the nominative first-person pronoun reflects the dogged resistance of the ego, under cover of the other, to communal progress.
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1 Twitter, once upon a time. Italics added, for emphasis, in this and all other citations here.
2 Saidiya Hartman, who should know better: “Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (Lose Your Mother, 2007).
3 Virginia Woolf, an early adopter (Mrs Dalloway, 1925).