Me either / neither
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Talking about a certain movie, I just wrote this on a list serve:
"I wouldn't watch a single minute of it".
Another member of the list commented, "Me either".
If I were he, I would have said, "Me neither".
Somehow, though, I feel that we're both correct. In any event, I've heard it said both ways.
Selected readings
- "*Neither Sentence Nor Sentence?" (11/8/19)
- "'No telling is neither complete nor accurate'" (9/25/16)
- "Everything cannot not be unbelievable, either" (8/10/21)
- "Weird grammar" (2/22/10)
Michael Sullivan said,
June 22, 2021 @ 2:42 pm
I'd be torn between "Nor would I" and "Nor me."
Craig said,
June 22, 2021 @ 3:09 pm
I would favor "Me neither" if only for prosodic reasons — "me either" sounds awkward because the second word begins with the same vowel sound that the first word ended with. But "Neither would I" or just "Nor I" is also good.
Amanda M. said,
June 22, 2021 @ 3:14 pm
As an English woman I would say, copying the verb from the original comment, "Neither would I." The comment, "I didn't like the film" would elicit "Neither did I."
S Frankel said,
June 22, 2021 @ 3:48 pm
*"Either did I" is impossible, though, so that's not a good comparison.
David Morris said,
June 22, 2021 @ 3:58 pm
I would probably say 'neither would I' (sub-question nee-ther or nye-ther?) or 'me neither'. I have noticed many ESL students (and probably my ESL-speaking wife) say 'me either'.
I was surprised to find that Google Ngrams shows 'me either' comfortably ahead, and greatly increased since 2000, but that doesn't show the context. I am trying to think of any common context in which I would use 'me either'.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:10 pm
To me, "me either" feels natural in a sentence like "she hadn't told me either", but strange in isolation.
David Marjanović said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:12 pm
That's interesting. It wouldn't occur to me – I might go for *"not me either" if I didn't know better, though.
Alexander Browne said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:25 pm
American English speaker, and "me neither" sounds informal while "me either" sounds very informal. (As to which you should use, I could(n't) care less.)
David Morris said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:27 pm
I can think of sentences like 'The genie offered me either fame or fortune', but these are not likely to be common.
Kenny Easwaran said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:32 pm
I remember when I was a kid, "me either" felt like the thing that other kids said, while "me neither" felt correct. At least, I had strong opinions of that sort.
On the other hand, as someone mentioned above, when it's not elliptical, it sounds much better as "that doesn't appeal to me either" than as "that doesn't appeal to me neither".
Jerry Friedman said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:39 pm
"Neither would I" (or something with "I") is the prescriptive answer for this situation. People who use that might be able to say how they'd agree with "This film didn't appeal to me."
I believe there's a prescription for "me either"—for instance, I remember my father correcting himself from "me neither" to "me neither" after he married an elementary-school teacher, and I suspect those two things are related. The justification would be "It didn't appeal to me either."
However, to my surprise, the only prescriptions I could find on line were the other way: saying that only "me neither" is correct because you need the negative. Here's an example. There are also sites that say both are correct and sites that say neither is, apparently assuming that the speaker is agreeing with someone who said "I".
Terry K. said,
June 22, 2021 @ 4:46 pm
David Morris, brought up pronounication, which I hadn't thought about reading this. For me, "me either" and "me neither" have to have "either"/"neither" with the vowel that matches "me". The EYE-ther (/ˈaɪð.ə(ɹ)/) pronounciation – for both words – sounds wrong.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 22, 2021 @ 5:59 pm
I don't think the usage in phrases like "doesn't appeal to me (n)either" is the same syntactic structure as bare "me neither." Bare "me neither" seems to be the negated version of bare "me too," i.e. it expresses agreement with a negative statement just as "me too" expresses agreement with a positive statement.
A. I want to go to that party.
B. Me too!
C. I don't want to go to that stupid party.
D. Me neither.
You can't say "I too" or "I neither," although you can say "I do too" or "I don't either." But you can't say "Me do too" or "Me don't either."
Bare "me either" as a synonym for "me neither" strikes my personal native-speaker ear as Just Wrong Wrong Wrong, although that doesn't mean there aren't people who say it. A quick dip into the google books corpus found some usages in dialogue in genre fiction (romance, mystery) of the sort where you don't imagine the publisher spends much time or money editing manuscripts before they go to press.
Josh R said,
June 22, 2021 @ 7:32 pm
I'm very much with J.W. Brewer on this. "It doesn't appeal to me, either," sounds fine (in fact, it sounds better than with "neither"). But "Me, neither" is a counterpart of "Me, too," and so "Me, either" sounds…well, I won't say "wrong," but it sounds off. In fact, my 4 year old, who is acquiring English as a secondary native language alongside Japanese, tends to say, "Me either," and I always correct it.
Arthur Waldron said,
June 22, 2021 @ 11:50 pm
Likewise.
Scott P. said,
June 23, 2021 @ 12:23 am
Spanish has the parallel construction 'yo tampoco'.
R. Fenwick said,
June 23, 2021 @ 1:41 am
@Jerry Friedman: However, to my surprise, the only prescriptions I could find on line were the other way: saying that only "me neither" is correct because you need the negative
I'm rather surprised at that one as well; surely the negative from the original sentence (which is essentially a prerequisite context for the use of me (n)either) establishes the contextual negation quite satisfactorily even if it doesn't find overt repetition in the answer.
That said, on a purely descriptive level I do generally say me neither even though my more usual pronunciation of both "either" and "neither" uses the PRICE vowel rather than the FLEECE vowel, and so the issue of vocalic hiatus mentioned by Craig above is not caused by both vowels being identical. I'd guess that this is still purely prosodic; my mouth seems to like the CVCVCV sequence in [miˑnɑeðɐ] rather than the CVVCV in [miˑɑeðɐ]. Though with that said, the more diphthongal nature of the FLEECE vowel in some AusE lects (with realisations through [ɪj] to [əj] in the broadest varieties) does presumably mean that "me either" is almost realised in a phonetically CVCVCV manner there too, [mɪjɑeðɐ] – maybe that's why it's so common here.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 23, 2021 @ 4:00 am
He's very good with children and no slouch around the house either
Would anybody use neither here instead?
https://oed.com/oed2/00072739
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 23, 2021 @ 4:15 am
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:either#Why_are_there_two_pronunciations_of_either?
bks said,
June 23, 2021 @ 7:46 am
I wouldn't watch a single minute of it, either. it was so good I had to watch many minutes.
TonyK said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:00 am
David Morris, your Google Ngram included non-sentence-initial hits such as "That doesn't suit me either." To exclude these, simply search for "Me neither" vs "Me either" — "Me neither" wins by about two to one.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:17 am
@ALB: Presumably one would say "no slouch around the house neither" if one were speaking a variety of English with negative concord a/k/a "double negatives." If you say "There isn't anything to worry about" in preference to "There ain't nothing to worry about" you will likely use "either" in the "no slouch around the house" context; if not, not.
Me, I think I say "me neither" rather than "me either" both because (a) it is the more common variant that I thus picked up by osmosis in childhood; and (b) it flows naturally from the way negation and polarity generally work (at the automatic/subconscious level) in my idiolect, including in contexts like this where I don't think I ever had a prescriptivist schoolteacher explicitly tell me which was the Right Variant which the Wrong Variant, if only because prescriptivist schoolteachers are more about discouraging the use of informal register than on explaining that informal register actually has its own grammatical rules. R. Fenwick's "surely" assertion (that no overt negative marker is needed in the "me (n)either" construction because it can be inferred from the context of the discourse) does not account for the data of my idiolect, other than I guess establishing that surely my idiolect could in principle have a different grammar than it actually happens to have.
Rose Eneri said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:45 am
I would say, "Me neither" because if you don't have the n you don't have negation. Similarly, one would not say, "Either would I."
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:53 am
Even formal Standard English has some constructions where negation is expressed more than once, e.g. "neither… nor…"
Dara Connolly said,
June 23, 2021 @ 4:26 pm
Terry K's point about pronunciation is intriguing. Like Terry, I have different pronunciations of "neither" in "me neither" and "neither would I".
Jerry Friedman said,
June 23, 2021 @ 6:15 pm
Rose Eneri: I would say, "Me neither" because if you don't have the n you don't have negation. Similarly, one would not say, "Either would I."
The difference, it seems to me, is that the doesn't have a verb, so it refers to a verb in the sentence being responded to, and the other does have a verb.
One would say, for instance,
"I guess you don't like champagne."
"Or any wine, for that matter."
Or
"Who do you think is not qualified to be president?"
"Anyone who wants the job."
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 23, 2021 @ 6:32 pm
@Jerry Friedman
Reinforcing negatives in different clauses:
That's not a good idea, I don't think.
Jerry Friedman said,
June 23, 2021 @ 7:21 pm
Antonio L. Banderas: I don't understand. Are you saying something I wrote isn't a good idea? If so, what? It's true that both of my set-up lines have two clauses, but what if I'd written "Apparently you don't like champagne" and "In your view, who is not qualified to be president?"?
(I recognize your sentence with "I don't think" as something sometimes prescribed against.)
R. Fenwick said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:44 pm
@J.W. Brewer: R. Fenwick's "surely" assertion (that no overt negative marker is needed in the "me (n)either" construction because it can be inferred from the context of the discourse) does not account for the data of my idiolect, other than I guess establishing that surely my idiolect could in principle have a different grammar than it actually happens to have.
Um. Did I say something to offend? Your tone comes across as rather snarky if not outright passive-aggressive here. With my statement my intent was to agree overtly with what you said in the first place, which I requote (emphasis added): "However, to my surprise, the only prescriptions I could find on line were the other way: saying that only "me neither" is correct because you need the negative." You expressed your surprise at this prescriptive assertion. I agreed with you in also expressing surprise at this prescriptive assertion. And what I was saying subsequently was not aimed at your idiolect at all, but at what I personally found surprising about the specific prescriptive assertion you also cited as being so surprising.
R. Fenwick said,
June 23, 2021 @ 8:51 pm
@Jerry Friedman: I believe there's a use-mention confusion going on with your response to Antonio L. Banderas's comment. I hope he'll weigh in to confirm, but the way I read his comment, he was not at all commenting on the quality of your argument, but merely citing an example sentence That's not a good idea, I don't think that exhibits reinforcing negatives in separate clauses.
Bloix said,
June 23, 2021 @ 10:00 pm
Hypothesis: There's a generational divide – me neither is for olds, me either for the young folk.
Carefully devised experiment: ask my two boys (millennials) how they'd respond to "I wouldn't eat worms!"
Result: Older boy: me either! Younger boy: me neither!
Conclusion: Need larger sample size.
Tom Dawkes said,
June 23, 2021 @ 11:18 pm
This strikes me as a particularly American issue. As a British native speaker, my instinctive reply would be "Neither would I", and "Me neither" or "Me either" would never occur to me.
Jerry Friedman said,
June 23, 2021 @ 11:21 pm
R. Fenwick: I was the one who was surprised to see prescriptions for "me neither", but J. W. Brewer was the one who said your comments didn't describe his idiolect.
Thanks for your thoughts on Antonio L. Banderas's comment. I still don't understand it, though, and I too am hoping he'll come back and clarify it.
Next: "I have not, I will too, and I didn't either!" —R. A. Heinlein, The Star Beast
Jerry Friedman said,
June 23, 2021 @ 11:22 pm
Bloix: You left out the part about the grant.
Philip Taylor said,
June 24, 2021 @ 5:29 am
I would second Tom Hawkes' hypotheses that "this [is] a particularly American issue" and that for native speakers of <Br.E>, "Neither would I" would be the most natural response. "Me neither" I would understand if I were to hear it as a response, but "me either" would leave me totally confused. At school we learned (either, or) & (neither, nor) as pairs, and I might alternatively respond "Nor I", but it would not feel quite as idiomatic as "Neither would I", seeming more of a written idiom than a spoken one.
Chris Button said,
June 24, 2021 @ 6:51 am
I would also concur that “me either” and “I could care less” (vs “me neither” and “I couldn’t care less” are North Americanisms rather than Britishisms (I’m not really qualified to comment on other varieties of English).
Linda Seebach said,
June 24, 2021 @ 7:40 am
Two possible (formal) responses to "I didn't like the film":
"Neither did I." In informal speech, that becomes "me neither."
or
"I didn't either." and that yields "me either."
Philip Taylor said,
June 24, 2021 @ 7:56 am
I think, Linda, that "I didn't either" must yield "me neither", since the elided "not" in "didn't" would otherwise be lost.
Jerry Friedman said,
June 24, 2021 @ 9:01 am
For the British and other people who would say "Neither would I," I'm still interested in how you might agree with "It didn't appeal to me," "It didn't impress me," etc.
mollymooly said,
June 24, 2021 @ 10:33 am
In my Irish idiolect, "Neither AUX I" and "Me neither" are both standard, the latter informal. "Me either" I would have interpreted as a childish mistake, or adolescent deliberate-mistake. It may well have become widespread among young Irish adults without my noticing; I must listen out for it.
To me, it seems harder to say "me either" than "me neither", since there are consecutive identical vowels the former; where it is widespread, do many people reduce it to "meether"?
To Jerry Friedman: I guess the British response to "It didn't impress me" would be "Nor me". To me that's formal but idiomatic.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 24, 2021 @ 10:33 am
@Jerry Friedman
That would lead to the subjective/objective pronoun debate, already mentioned by @J.W. Brewer above, which is especially relevant in case of potential ambiguity.
Kate Bunting said,
June 24, 2021 @ 11:01 am
"It didn't appeal to me." "Nor [to] me."
I too find "Me either" completely unidiomatic. (BrE speaker).
Jerry Friedman said,
June 24, 2021 @ 11:04 am
mollymooly: Thanks for answering my question.
Antonio L. Banderas: Thank you too. But now I'm having trouble telling which of my comments you're answering. It's not the one where I asked you for clarification but the one where I mentioned "It didn't impress me," right?
Actually, the subjective-objective pronoun debate is part of what's going on in "Neither would I" versus "Me (n)either", and I was trying to avoid it by bringing up "It didn't impress me" (or "It didn't bother me" or "It isn't familiar to me" or whatever), since no similar reply with "I" is possible there.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 24, 2021 @ 11:09 am
I apologize for whatever infelicities of tone or phrasing on my part may have led to R. Fenwick and I talking past each other a bit. I am both: (a) unsurprised that I don't recall being taught the "correctness" of "me neither" in school; and (b) unsurprised that by contrast some usage advice out there on the internet does address the issue and recommends "me neither" over "me either." I don't know much about the particular source linked to (including how "prescriptivist" it is in going beyond "this is the way most native speakers do it and if you do it the other way you may sound weird" to "this is how you should do it even if quite a lot of native speakers don't") but there is certainly a legitimate need, especially among ESL speakers, for good advice in matters of this sort. As I think has previously been noted on this site in various other contexts, usage advice designed for an ESL context (which may not be what was linked to, but I'm just riffing now) is often both broader in scope and more sensibly explained than the formal "this is correct and this isn't" instruction one gets in English class in a school that presumes an L1 Anglophone student body.
I suddenly thought to check if MWDEU has anything to say about "me (n)either" but I'm working at my actual office rather than my home office today so I don't have my copy to hand.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 24, 2021 @ 11:29 am
NOR (negative conjunction): Following upon an affirmative clause, or in continuative narration, with the force of "neither" or "and…not".
They are happy, nor need we worry.
Nor did I stop to think, but ran.
https://oed.com/oed2/00159515
Philip Taylor said,
June 24, 2021 @ 11:49 am
Jerry — 'I'm still interested in how you might agree with "It didn't appeal to me," "It didn't impress me," etc'. For the first, "Nor did it [appeal] to me", and for the latter, "Nor did it [impress] me", where the word in square brackets would normally be implied rather than spoken.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 24, 2021 @ 1:24 pm
@Philip Taylor
Wouldn't "me (n)either" be enough as a reply for either?
Charlotte Stinson said,
June 24, 2021 @ 2:03 pm
In a Manchester UK dialect I’ve heard, they seem to avoid all forms of “me too” and “me neither/either.” Instead they would reply to “I wouldn’t see that movie” by saying, “I wouldn’t!” and they would mean by that exactly the same thing as “neither would I.” I find this odd but charming. Has anyone else run across this?
Philip Taylor said,
June 24, 2021 @ 2:26 pm
Antonio — 'Wouldn't "me (n)either" be enough as a reply for either?' I don't really know what "enough" would imply in this context, but for most Britons it would be distinctly unidiomatic.
Jerry Friedman said,
June 24, 2021 @ 2:43 pm
Philip Taylor: Thanks for answering my question.
Pamela said,
June 26, 2021 @ 8:20 am
"nor I." the problem isn't either/neither since the meaning is clearly negative "neither" sounds better because "me" ends in a vowel. either way. but objective case is wrong. except, in colloquialism grammar gets ignored. so if i person says "me neither" that projects one kind of persona. if he or she correctly says "nor I,' that is another kind of persona.
Pamela said,
June 26, 2021 @ 8:23 am
on the other hand, if the prompting sentence was not "I wouldn't…" but was something like "I wasnt' [chosen, cheated, defeated, fined, etc…] then the appropriate response would be objective "nor me." or, "me neither."
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 26, 2021 @ 8:51 am
What about "(n)either me/I"/him/He/etc. ?
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2021 @ 8:21 am
' What about "(n)either me/I"/him/He/etc. ? ' — not idiomatic in this context, at least in my topolect. "Neither he nor I were (or was) able to solve the puzzle" is fine, but as a response to "It didn't appeal to me," "It didn't impress me," etc., none of "(n)either <pronoun> are valid.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 27, 2021 @ 8:51 am
@Phillip Taylor,
Why is that so? Syntactically it'd be derived as follows
"It didn't appeal to me,"
Neither (did it (do) to) me.
"It didn't impress me,"
Neither (did it (do)) me.
Rodger C said,
June 27, 2021 @ 9:40 am
Antonio, there's no "reason," it just isn't idiomatic. It sounds like a Romance-ism.
Rodger C said,
June 27, 2021 @ 9:41 am
"Nor I" or "nor me" would be cromulent English but sounds literary.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2021 @ 11:55 am
I don't think that "Nor I" or "Nor me" sound literary to the British ear, but perhaps more "careful" if that concept is universally meaningful. In other words, if I were eating out with friends, and remarked after one particular course, "Well, that didn't appeal to me very much, although I had been looking forward to trying it", then the most likely response from someone to whom it also did not appeal would be "No, it didn't appeal to me either". But "Nor I, I'm afraid" would not feel out of place, and the choice of response might well be indicative of the social class of the speaker.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
June 27, 2021 @ 12:10 pm
@Philip Taylor
Wouldn't "Nor I, I'm afraid" in that reply be hypercorrection?
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2021 @ 4:36 pm
Yes, it would ! I have a feeling that before I added ", I'm afraid", I had originally written just "Nor me", then realised that such a bare statement would almost certainly have to be followed by some sort of apology (", I'm afraid", or ", I'm sorry to say") and during the editing process I inadvertently hyper-corrected "Nor me" to "Nor I". I will have to try with a few friends and see what fraction respond with each variant …
Fred McMurray said,
June 29, 2021 @ 3:58 am
My L1 is American English and I guess I'll be the first here to admit that I've said "me either" on more than one occasion. Of course, "me neither" is "proper" to my ear too like everyone else here. But for sure I've said "me either" before.
I can't say reliably when or why I've said this, but one guess is laziness. Someone above said that "me either" is harder to say, but I disagree. Esp in fast speech and if you blur the phrase as meeeeither. No breath, glottal stop, or whatever required. Also, it sometimes feels, to me at least, to be more of a chore to actually add the negative. Not so much in the oral cavity. More mentally. Like "gasp, ok, FINE dad, I'll say neither" to a parent's grammatical correction at the dinner table. :) Particularly in fast and informal speech.
Or maybe it's that the agreement is the more important aspect of this utterance, so it doesn't harm anything to ignore the negation. Sort of like an anti-double-negative, for lack of a better phrase.
Or what about when someone says "Do you mind if I sit here?". Presumably the response would be "No, I don't mind. Have a seat". But often, the response is rather: "Yes! Have a seat!". That seems to be a case of affirmation of a negative. Sort of like how "me either" feels to me. Maybe it feels unnecessary to have this distinction between agreeing on a negative vs. agreeing on a positive. Why not just agree?
Maybe neither will even disappear from use one day in America.