Jonathan Agnew recently described off-the-record interviews as those where you agree that it’s ‘between you and I’. Last month, Jess Phillips tweeted that she had ‘read a few wild accounts of Boris Johnson and I in the lobby’. And a Times journalist wrote about someone who had ‘made Jenny and I feel so welcome’. All three are articulate, intelligent people. And yet all three wrote ‘I’ where they meant ‘me’.
It’s happening more and more. The only explanation can be self-doubt. Give any of these people a second to think about it, and they’ll reply that yes, of course they should have said ‘me’. It’s easy to work out: just remove the other person from the sentence. You’d never say that so-and-so ‘would make I feel so welcome’. Yet somehow the ‘I’ epidemic is spreading. People hear others saying it, and begin to feel — against everything they know — that they should say it too.
It’s like one of those experiments in which respondents are asked which of three lines on a piece of paper is the longest, not knowing that the other people in the room are actors primed to say ‘C’ rather than ‘B’. You’d be amazed how many people give in and, even though the evidence is there in front of them, say ‘C’ too.
You can understand why it’s happening with ‘and I’. We’re scared of the mistake in the opposite direction — as in ‘Terry and me went to the pub’. We’ve all been taught that it should be ‘Terry and I’. Plus we’ve heard the Queen say ‘my husband and I’ a lot. So we begin to use ‘and I’ even when it’s wrong.
But my point here is not to campaign in favour of the correct usage.
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