Bill Lipsitt, of Austin, Texas, writes: “I find a sentence like ‘She gave the book to Bob and I’ jarring, and it’s my impression that the misuse of subject pronouns is getting worse. I even heard a smart, well-educated young adult say ‘It’s Bob and I’s book.’ An acquaintance recently made the case that ‘She let Bob and I play’ was grammatical.
“But someone in a social media post argued that labeling a photo with ‘This is Joe and I’ was an egregious misuse of a subject pronoun. I’m not so sure about that. It seems to me it’s the same basic idea as my answering a phone when someone asks for me with ‘This is he’ — technically correct, as I understand it, but so stiff and formal that few these days would insist on it. What do you think about both issues?”
Bill, I too am puzzled when I hear someone say something like “She gave Bob and I the book.” Everybody says “She gave me the book,” not “She gave I the book,” so why should the pronoun change just because we bring Bob into it?
I’ve heard a couple of explanations for this solecism: Someone who has been corrected for saying “Me and Bob gave her the book” may get the idea that I is the right word to use when another person is involved or that I is all-around better grammar than me.
As for “This is Joe and I,” you’re right that it’s technically correct but it’s certainly not idiomatic. It’s correct because to be in all its wonderfully varied forms (am, are, is, was, were, and so forth) is the prime example of a naughtily named “copulative” verb, which couples, or equates, the subject and a complement, rather than having the subject act on an object, as most verbs do (for instance, “This boggles the mind”). Subject complements, unlike objects, are supposed to be in the same case as subjects.
What to do about a possessive like “Bob and I’s book” is another story, because “Bob and my book” sounds as much like a person and a book as it does like a book with two co-owners. It’s technically correct, as using “Let’s go over to Bob and Beth’s house!” as an analogy will demonstrate. No one would say “Bob’s and Beth’s house” to refer to a couple’s home, though “Bob’s and Beth’s houses” would be perfectly fine to describe the separate homes of two individuals.
But once you replace the name “Beth’s” with “my” or “her” or any other possessive adjective, the construction sounds off. It’s better to evade the problem with something like “the book that Bob and I share.”
I very much doubt that today’s elementary school teachers get into this kind of thing. The last I heard, the consensus was that it’s more productive to have kids spend their time writing than learning the names of the parts of speech and diagramming sentences. Also the last I heard, the consensus was that once children start going to school, their speech patterns are influenced more strongly by the way the children around them speak than by the way their parents or teachers do.
So it’s unsurprising if nonstandard English rears its head fairly often. People who want to be speaking standard English tend to figure out, sooner or later, what pronouns belong where. So I try not to be judgmental unless ungrammatical and unidiomatic phrasing butts into realms where standard English is expected.
Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.