“I” Used Incorrectly!

Last panel. He sounds sophisticated, right?

The problem is that in this sentence, that last word is a direct object, which should be “me.” “It has destroyed me,” not “It has destroyed I.”

If the sentence had had a linking verb, then the last word would have been a predicate nominative, which should be “I.” For example, “She is a better painter than I (am).”

Tricky tricky

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Last panel. Shouldn’t it be “wiser than me”?

Having the pronoun all by itself gives a strong direct object signal, “me.” But we have an ellipsis here. The last word is left off. The ‘correct’ sentence ends with “wiser than I am.” Now the “I” sounds right!

I should add a bit more information. That sentence has another ellipsis. Put “who is” after “someone.” Now, perhaps, you can see that “I” is a predicate nominative, not a direct object.

Okay, class, lesson’s over. Don’t feel bad; no one will notice if you get this kind of sentence wrong.

I have to discipline myself not to answer unasked questions about grammar mistakes. Here’s the comic:

Now. How many of you wondered about the title to this post having “me” instead of “I”? After all, technically, linking verbs get predicate nominatives, not direct objects. But “This is I” sure sounds unnatural.

I think the grammatical solution would be to change the whole sentence to something like “This is something I would be tempted to do.” Yeah, it’s not as concise, and short headlines are generally better. Besides, using “me” gives me a point of grammar to write about!

Brooke McEldowney is one of my favorite cartoonists, partly because he does his grammar well. I’m certain this is intentional:

I’ve written about separable verbs (e.g. to gross out, to put up with) before. In the upper right corner you can do a search on “separable” to find my other posts on the subject. He’s following the bogus rule not to end a sentence with a preposition. (See those previous posts.)

And the “whom” is correct. “Whom” is the direct object, even though it serves as an interrogative.

First speech bubble. It’s correct!

That “whom” sounds wrong because we’re used to hearing the subject of the sentence first. That ‘whom’ is really the object of “of.” You can also say that the “whom” is introducing the noun clause that’s the direct object of “know”!

To fix the word order a bit, you’d have:

Do you know of whom she reminds me?

Of course now you have a rather awkward question. I fear that “who” will become the only form to appear at the beginning of a sentence regardless of the word’s function in the sentence.

PS—If it were me, I’d write. “Hey! She reminds me of someone I knew.”

PPS—Since I ran into it today, here’s a strip that gets it wrong twice. Second panel:

PPPS—And here’s one where he gets it right. First panel.

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.