"Between you and I"
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Politics aside, there's been some prescriptivist reaction to (part of) a Signal exchange between White House aides Anthony Salisbury and Patrick Weaver about the idea of deploying the 82nd Airborne to Portland. From The Guardian :
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver said.
For some people, it should be "between you and me", and "between you and I" is annoyingly wrong. I've gotten a couple of emails about this. So here's the (complicated) story.
In the first place, elite writers have been using similar forms for centuries. Wikipedia starts with these:
"Between you and I" occurs in act 3, scene 2, of The Merchant of Venice, in a letter written in prose by Antonio, the titular character, to his friend Bassanio: "Sweet Bassanio, … all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death."
Writer and critic Henry Hitchings points to usage in William Congreve's The Double Dealer (1693) and in Mark Twain's letters. Otto Jespersen found similar examples ("pronouns or nouns plus I after a preposition", in Robert J. Menner's words) in Ben Jonson, John Bunyan, Charles Dickens, and Graham Greene, and Menner adds Noah Webster, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Middleton, and others. Writer Constance Hale notes that Ernest Hemingway frequently used pronouns this way: "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers."
In face, the evidence from Literature Online (LION) is that "between you and I" was the dominant form until late in the 19th century — and has been recently resurgent:
| "between you and I" | "between you and me" | |
| 233 | 1162 | |
 |
 |
Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage offers three theories, followed by many examples:
Of all the theories advanced to explain the existence of between you and I, the most popular one (invoked as recently as Arnis 1998) is that the phrase is the result of children being taught to avoid me in “it is me,” with the result that I is substituted for me in places where it should not be. The technical term for avoiding one grammatical trap only to fall in another is hypercorrection. Barnard 1979 will not accept hypercorrection as the cause, however:
But in the Stratford Grammar School where Shakespeare was a pupil, it had not occurred to anybody that English grammar needed to be taught—only Latin. Yet the Bard has one of his heroes, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, tell his friend Bassanio: “all debts are cleared between you and I.” And this is not in light conversation, but in a letter written in the face of death.
A different explanation is offered by Henry Sweet, in his New English Grammar (1892). Sweet suggests that the early modern English between you and I resulted from you and I being so frequently joined together as subject of a sentence that the words formed a sort of group compound with an invariable last element. The invariable last element is also mentioned by Anthony Burgess (in a book review collected in Homage to Qwert Yuiop, 1986), who notes that in some West Country dialects of England I is the invariable first person pronoun.
Another possible explanation (unnoticed by the comentaros) comes from the linguist Noam Chomsky. In his Barriers, 1986, he says that compound phrases like you and I are barriers to the assignment of grammatical case. This means that between can assign case only to the whole phrase and not to the individual words that make it up. Thus the individual pronouns are free to be nominative or objective or even reflexives. Chomsky's theory would also explain some other irregularities in pronoun use (See PRONOUNS); it's the best that has been offered so far.
I'm somewhat skeptical of the barriers theory, for reasons to be discussed another time.
But anyhow, no one should be shuddering for grammatical reasons about the Salisbury/Weaver exchange.
Joe said,
October 5, 2025 @ 10:05 am
The version of the story I learned was the hypercorrection one, though slightly different: not a result of teaching students to avoid "It is me" (at this point "it is I" sounds archaic) but rather to avoid "Sally and me went to the movies". If so, it would be prescriptivists complaining about the result of previous prescriptivists' effort.
How did it work with "thou/thee", which was inflected with a case? Was it always either "thou and I" or "thee and me", or could they mix and match?
Bob Ladd said,
October 5, 2025 @ 10:14 am
Joe's version of the story is also the one I always thought was the explanation.
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 5, 2025 @ 10:54 am
More than one explanation can be right. Maybe hypercorrection can't explain Shakespeare's usage, but it can still play a role in the recent resurgence.
Viseguy said,
October 5, 2025 @ 10:59 am
Between you, me and the lamppost, this is one that sets my prescriptivist teeth on edge. I've always thought of it as a hypercorrection to avoid sounding somehow "impolite".
JimG said,
October 5, 2025 @ 11:29 am
Just between us prescriptivist chickens, my own rule for referring to myself and another person, is to politely mention the other person first, and then add my pronoun, choosing the nominative I or the objective me that would be correct if I were alone in the sentence.
My exception to my rule is when communication is through a closed door or by telephone, when I informally say, "Hi! It's me."
This is a uniquely anglophone issue, no?
DJL said,
October 5, 2025 @ 11:39 am
Kudos to Merriam-Webster for adding Chomsky's Barriers account to the mix, though, regardless of the status of "barriers" in current syntactic theory.
ktschwarz said,
October 5, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
"Between you and I" is the very issue for which Arnold Zwicky coined "recency illusion" on Language Log on August 7, 2005, and it's come up here many, many times since.
And now here's Mark Liberman with the numbers showing that the recency isn't entirely an illusion! I'm bothered, though, by the two graphs having obviously different vertical scales. I'd like to see them both together on the same chart, so we can compare them, and with the time scale labeled.
Duncan said,
October 5, 2025 @ 12:43 pm
For me, "and I" is the invariant; it's never "and me":
It's [just] me.
I went to town.
It's [just] you and I.
It's just my sister and I.
My sister and I played Twister.
It's just her and I.
He and I went to town.
It's just Diane and I.
… "and me" just sounds weird. I know it's "correct" in some cases, because of that first single "me", but it's just not something I'd say or write, certainly in any "real time" composition-to-delivery case. Really the only case I can imagine using "and me" in would be if someone else were proof-reading and called it to my attention, and even then, while I'd know why and would correct it if appropriate, I'd still find it unnatural usage.
I remember first becoming aware of and contemplating my "incorrect" usage I guess sometime around ten years old (4th grade, '78 or so), but the usage was so natural to me I'd seldom even be aware I had used such a compound in ordered to evaluate correctness, so it never changed.
So Sweet's theory sounds reasonable to me, except that it doesn't have to be "_you_ and I", for me it can be "and I", and is never "and me".
Coby said,
October 5, 2025 @ 12:48 pm
It's interesting that Spanish also has entre tú y yo, even though one would normally expect the objective case after a preposition (as for example in Italian fra te e me).
Duncan said,
October 5, 2025 @ 12:50 pm
Hmm… it took my angle-brackets as HTML; try square:
for me it can be [anything] "and I", and is never [anything] "and me".
Annie Gottlieb said,
October 5, 2025 @ 4:12 pm
Prescriptivist confession (though I grumpily yield to, as W. Safire put it, "Norma Loquendi" as the final authority): When "___ and I" is an indirect or direct object, I suggest removing the other person: "Would you say, "He gave it to I"?
Garrett Wollman said,
October 5, 2025 @ 5:21 pm
Joining the chorus: I was specifically taught as a child not that and I was iinvariable, but rather that in such compounds (whether as subject or object) it was rude to put the speaker first — i.e., that the first-person pronoun must always be the final conjunct. It doesn't seem like much of an overgeneralization from always "and [1sg]" to always "and I", especially at an age when children aren't being taught syntax and don't have a way to talk about the general phenomenon yet.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 5, 2025 @ 7:00 pm
There are a zillion (well, I found eight or nine different ones on the first page of google-search results) songs titled "Just Between You and Me." And the key bit of that appears in plenty of other popular-song lyrics, e.g. Dave Mason's Seventies hit with the line (in the chorus) "There's only you and me and we just disagree." I appreciate the various reasons why some people might think "you and I" is acceptable in literally all possible syntactic contexts regardless of "case," but I'm puzzled by the notion that some people might think "you and I" is universally obligatory and "you and me" can never be an acceptable-if-not-mandatory option in any context.
In terms of "polite order," the google books Ngram viewer confirms that "you and I" is more common than "I and you" and that "you and me" is more common than "me and you," but what is interesting is that the ratio by which the first-person-second order dominates is much more skewed and extreme for the "I" forms than the "me" forms. To me (YMMV) this is consistent with the hypothesis that the "I" forms are at least in part a result of hypercorrection, since the supposed obligatory-polite-order norm is (to me, YMMV) the sort of obvious total bullshit that would typically only be fully internalized by the same sort of people prone to hypercorrection. I can certainly understand (see Garret Wollman's comment) why parents or Sunday School teachers or whatnot meeting certain sociological diagnoses might have tried to inculcate that sort of norm, but part of growing up is refusing to be inculcated with obvious-total-bullshit norms by credibility-deficient authority figures.
Haamu said,
October 5, 2025 @ 7:06 pm
I don't understand why anyone would say or write "just between you and I" when they could omit two needless words by going with the logically equivalent "just between we."
Martin Schwartz said,
October 5, 2025 @ 8:17 pm
It's no
t just a matter of "I' as object, or problems of seklf-reference."And" is also relevant. Note:
"Alice and her are vakers', and also "Her and Alice are bakers"
have become usual, Further, "Me and you are on the same side".
An anecdote: About 2o years ago a guy I knew was holding forth
before a bunch of acquaintances about how a long relationship he had with a woman did not work out. ",,, and the most painful thing was she wrote m a a lttewr saying 'I realize now how little there was
between you and I'." When one of the group expressed sympathy,
the complainer exclaimed, "No, no, what was painful was her
'between you and I' and not 'between you and me'!"
Meanwhile, as a prescriptivist I am constantly pained by both American
'different than" and British "different to"; I still say "diffewrent from".
Martin Schwartz
S Frankel said,
October 5, 2025 @ 9:17 pm
@Martin Schwartz
American here, and I agree that many of us say "different than" where I am more comfortable with "different from," but there are times when it's unavoidable; for example, "It's different than it used to be."
Martin Schwartz said,
October 6, 2025 @ 2:42 am
@S Frankel: True, and it explains the prescriptively wrong instances of
"different than" as arising from analogical extension..British "different to" is based on some scenario like "compared to"., I'd think.
Martin Schwartz
Peter Cyrus said,
October 6, 2025 @ 5:02 am
So many English conjunctions are also prepositions that I think the distinction is being blurred. This observation is directly relevant to examples like "different than", but maybe it also causes our grammar engines to treat "and" as a preposition, thus always followed by "me".
Philip Taylor said,
October 6, 2025 @ 5:18 am
For this Briton, "It's different than it used to be" is a construct I would expect only to find in the idiolects of non-native speakers. "It's different from how it used to be" or "It's different to what it used to be", on the other hand, both read to me as normal everyday (native) English.
Chris Button said,
October 6, 2025 @ 6:58 am
@ Martin Schwartz
I only ever use "different from" as well. I assume, like you, that "different than" and "different to" are analogical extensions. No idea though.
Michael Watts said,
October 6, 2025 @ 3:01 pm
That's not a great example of from being unavoidable; it's easy to say "it's different from how it used to be".
In personal use, I might use different [than] or different [from]; different [to] would be a mistake on my part.
Michael Watts said,
October 6, 2025 @ 8:34 pm
I figured it was by analogy to "similar to".