Ask LLOG: "I's" ?
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Email from JK:
My daughter remarked that on several occasions recently she has heard presumably college-educated people use the word “I’s”, in a sentence like "I just picked up Margaret and I’s cat from the vet."
I'm guessing the reason for this jarring (to me) usage is that the sentence could be more logically parsed as
I just picked up Margaret and (my cat) from the vet than as
I just picked up (Margaret and my) cat from the vet.
The brain turns to I just picked up Margaret and I’s cat from the vet as a solution because because Margaret and I is a strong connection like my cat, and it's encountered first in the sentence.
So it's parsed as I just picked up (Margaret and I)’s cat from the vet.
That sounds awful, but is it acceptable usage (obligatory SMBC reference)?
There's quite a bit of discussion about this on the web, e.g.
"Pronouns and joint possession"
"My Friend and I’s Grammar Problem: Joint Possession with Pronouns"
"and I's or and my?"
"Possessives and attributives"
[…]
The earliest example I've found is in the subtitles for an episode of “Married with Children” from 1992:
We're busy over here now, Bud. It's your mother and I's quality time.
[Found via the COCA corpus, which has 67 other examples]
But I wouldn't be surprised to find examples from much earlier dates.
And we shouldn't forget the other source of I's, as in this phrase from the 1921 play Granny Boling:
I's lived a long time, boy, and I's seed a heap of trouble.
Laura Morland said,
August 4, 2026 @ 4:33 pm
I'm embarrassed to admit that my husband makes this error. He's a well-known mathematician with a lot of joint papers, and so he often has occasion to say "Anne and I's paper," "Stuart and I's talk," etc. It drives me crazy!
I understand the "logic" of it, but it's not English. Over the past 30 years, I've corrected him at least 100 times ("You wouldn't say "I's paper," would you?"), but the grammar rule just doesn't "take". To him, the correct phrase, such as "Ben's and my paper," simply sounds weird.
Still, I hope this usage never becomes acceptable English, along with such ear-graters as "on accident," "go lay down," and (the worst!) "him and me" (as subject pronouns).
Signed,
The Relentless Prescriptivist
NSBK said,
August 4, 2026 @ 6:02 pm
Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to detect, particularly on the internet, which is all I'll say about Laura Morland's comment.
Regarding the question asked (is it acceptable usage?), my answer is yes.
I'd guess that the form "Margaret and I's cat" works for me because I allow enclitic ['s] to be tacked on to a compound noun phrase in order to make it possessive. And I wouldn't use "I's cat" because making the pronoun "I" possessive turns it into "my".
The form "Margaret's and my cat" is maybe more parallel, and also acceptable.
Both forms sound equally awkward to me. But the alternative to using a possessive would be something like "the cat Margaret and I own" or "one of the cats Margaret and I care for", which requires the work of incorporating specificity (the cat / one of the cats / etc) and relationship (own / care for / etc), which may not be worth it or even appropriate for the conversation.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 4, 2026 @ 6:08 pm
Why not just use the more mellifluous "me and Margaret's cat"? When one of the two members of a coordinate construction like this is a pronoun, putting the 's ending on the other one (by putting the pronoun first) seems a simple strategy to avoid the weirdness of appending the 's to the pronoun. Note also that if people didn't insist prescriptively on trying to use "I" where "me" feels more idiomatic, they wouldn't get backed into this sort of awkward corner in the first place.
To one of Laura Morland's points, I have a strong preference for "me and him" over "him and me" in subject position, but the corpus data suggests that this may be a matter of personal taste and there's no accounting for taste.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 4, 2026 @ 6:19 pm
In response to NSBK, note somewhat more technically that part of the problem here is that people are trying to stick a "nominative" pronoun into a "genitive" construction. Why do that? Why does that seem "logical"? "Me and Margaret's cat" = "The cat of me and Margaret."* Would you say "the cat of Margaret and I"?* If the question is "To whom belongeth this cat," the answer is "Verily, this cat belongeth to me and Margaret." Is that formal-register enough for the self-appointed prescriptivists?
*In a non-compound context you can recast "you're not my boss" as "you're not the boss of me," but not as *"you're not the boss of I."
JMGN said,
August 4, 2026 @ 6:37 pm
CGEL (pag 482)
When one or more of the coordinates is a personal pronoun, the construction with marking on the final coordinate is of at best marginal acceptability:
[70 ] i a. [his and her]views b. [my and her] views [multiple marking]
? ii a. [you and Kim’s] views b. ∗[Kim and your] views [single marking]
Even the one with marking on all coordinates may sound somewhat awkward with some of the pronouns, such as my in [ib]. The single marking construction with a pronoun as the final coordinate will never have the ’s suffix. Thus ?"These are Kim and yours" is the only possible form: "∗These are Kim and you’s" is excluded because you is head of the final coordinate, and hence what is needed is a head genitive, not a phrasal one.
CGEL (pag 1332)
[25] pronoun first vs pronoun last
[Type i ] ? i a. [you and Kim’s] letters b. ∗[Kim and your] letters
[Type iia ] ii a. [your and Kim’s] letters b. [Kim’s and your] letters
[Type iib ] iii a. yours and Kim’s b. Kim’s and yours
[Type iii ] iv a. your letters and Kim’s b. Kim’s letters and yours
v a.yours and Kim’s letters b. [pre-empted by iib]
Type i is at best very marginal. The version with a genitive pronoun, [ib], is of the same status as [24 i], though the construction with an independent pronoun may be slightly better ( ? These are Kim and yours). The version with a non-genitive pronoun, [ia], is most acceptable when the second coordinate contains a dependent genitive: you and your partner’s letters. With pronouns that have distinct nominative and accusative forms, the accusative is clearly non-standard: ! me and Kim’s letters. The nominative is inadmissible with a 1 st person pronoun, ∗I and my partner’s letters, but perhaps marginally acceptable for some speakers with a 3rd person, ?they and their partners’ letters.
Type ii is grammatical but again disfavoured relative to Type iii or a non-coordinative construction. For Type iii there is a variant in which the head noun (letters) appears in the second coordinate, as in [va]. An attested example (from an address by a managing director) is It is mine and the board’s responsibility to maximise profits. The effect is to use an independent form of the pronoun in place of the dependent one that would normally be expected when the head noun comes at the end of the matrix NP, i.e. in place of my in my and the board’s responsibility. There is no counterpart to [va] with the pronoun in final position, since it is only with pronouns that the distinction between independent and dependent genitives applies: Kim’s and your letters will thus be construed as having the structure indicated in [iib] rather than [Kim’s][and your letters].
JPL said,
August 4, 2026 @ 7:20 pm
In addition to the correct "Ben's and my paper" and the CGEL pronoun examples, we also have "Ben and Jerry's ice cream", or "Fred and Sally's wedding" as a possible template for the illicit inflection on the pronoun, where the conjoined NP is apparently taken as a pair, rather than two individuals ("Fred's and Sally's weddings"). (Does the husband say things like, "Jones cited Ben and me's paper, but not Anne and me's paper"?) (What about, "Fred's and Sally's marriages to each other were successful; the ones to other people were not"?)
Joe said,
August 4, 2026 @ 7:26 pm
I wonder if there's an element of hypercorrection happening here. If we're really going to think in brackets, "(Margaret and I)'s cat" might be more idiomatic as "(Margaret and me)'s cat".
Anubis Bard said,
August 4, 2026 @ 7:39 pm
Personally, I would say, "Margaret and my's cat" rather than "Margaret and I's." It doesn't bear looking at, but feels perfectly natural to say.
HTI said,
August 4, 2026 @ 7:54 pm
I don't see the problem here. We don't even need to pretend that grammar is mathematically encodeable to explain the construction.
the cat of (Margaret and I) → (Margaret and I)'s cat
"[X] and I" is already plenty common ("you and I", "she and I", etc.), so this is very straightforward. "[X] and me" is also used to much the same effect, as suggested by Joe, although an appeal to hypercorrection is unnecessary. Either form is fine.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 4, 2026 @ 8:30 pm
The CGEL's "clearly non-standard" epithet for "me and Kim's letters" seems a bit harsh to me, and I don't differ from those guys' judgments all that often. I wonder if it's relevant that in the sentence in the original post here the phrase including the cat is itself in an "accusative" position.
Does the "accusative" pronoun (I might call it oblique or some other label) work better in:
1. "I just picked up me and Margaret's cat from the vet."
than in
2. "Me and Margaret's cat needs to go to the vet."?
If 1 feels less non-standard than 2, that may mean that evaluating "me and Margaret's cat" without regard to where it fits syntactically into a longer construction may be of limited use.
Gabriel said,
August 4, 2026 @ 8:31 pm
From my own experience being relentlessly corrected (and hearing others corrected) by grade-school teachers – "Don't say 'me and Margaret went to the store,' say 'Margaret and I went to the store'!" – the explanation seems straightforward: some speakers inferred that the rule is that references to oneself always become "I" when conjoined with another person.
Garrett Wollman said,
August 4, 2026 @ 9:16 pm
With all due respect to the authoritative CGEL, I'm going to bring up my high-school English handbook, which we all had to buy freshman year, Basic English Revisited by Sebranek and Meyer. In my 5th edition (from 1985), they write (paragraph 203, p. 34):
VanClumpin, VanDiken, and VanTulip's fish (All three own the same fish.)
VanClumpin's, VanDiken's, and VanTulip's fish (Each guy owns his own fish.)
This is probably the rule (call it, I guess, "possessive distributivity"?) that was taught to most American English speakers my age and older. This is actually a terrible example, though, because "fish" is a zero plural: for a noun with a regular plural like "cat", the second example would have to be "cats". But there are plenty of mass nouns that are formally singular where the ambiguity genuinely does arise.
Unfortunately, as this is the section on normative use of the apostrophe, it does not directly address the question of pronouns in possessive conjuncts, which is just as well.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 4, 2026 @ 9:46 pm
Meaningfully extant variation is "Sue and me's" ~ "me and Sue's" ~ "Sue and I's.", surely. "Sue's and my paper" is a real oddball at this stage and IMO kinda confusing. Partial credit for "Sue and my"
NSBK said,
August 4, 2026 @ 10:10 pm
@J.W. Brewer
I'll accept that "me and Margaret's cat" is actually much better to my ear than either version I discussed in my earlier comment.
My take on that is that in (my dialect of?) English our disjunctive pronouns are the object/accusative forms. When someone asks "who here wants pizza?" to a room you are in, what form of the first person pronoun do you use if your response has no verb? I would raise my hand and say "me!" and expect a chorus of "me"s from everyone else.
So I think it's less about the answer to "To whom does this cat belong" and more about the answer to "Who owns this cat?". Answering with no verb, the most natural response I can think of is either "me and Margaret" or "Margaret and me".
Then we take that form and add 's to make it a genitive construction.
That means I've settled on "I just picked up me and Margaret's cat from the vet." as my preferred version of the sentence in question.
Also:
– "I'm about to call to John. I just picked up him and Margaret's cat from the vet."
It looks strange written out, but when I hear it I have no problem with it.
NSBK said,
August 4, 2026 @ 10:42 pm
Of course that should be "I'm about to call John" or "I'm about to talk to John". In any case, the main sentence after that was written as intended.
Michael Watts said,
August 5, 2026 @ 1:27 am
The first clause seems malformed to me; I think it has to be "Fred and Sally's marriage to each other was successful".
This is not so much a statement about marking 's on one name or on both as it is about the fact that there is only one marriage involved in Fred and Sally's marriage to each other.
F said,
August 5, 2026 @ 3:18 am
Michael Watts: "… only one marriage…"
Not necessarily.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; or, more recently, Elon Musk and Talulah Riley. Admittedly "successful" would be inappropriate in both cases of both cases.
David Marjanović said,
August 5, 2026 @ 7:37 am
It's extremely English that 's is a clitic that attaches to entire phrases – and not an actual case ending that attaches to individual words.
That's actually the older form. 2000 years ago, "lay" was the causative of "lie", and you aren't already lying when you go lay down. The grammatical object was lost when North Sea Germanic lost the reflexive pronoun wholesale; in German it still is sich niederlegen (ich gehe mich niederlegen), with legen = lay instead of liegen = lie.
(…not to be confused with the other "lie", lügen.)
languagehat said,
August 5, 2026 @ 7:52 am
I understand the "logic" of it, but it's not English.
Public service announcement: anything that large numbers of English speakers say is English; that's what "the English language" means. Your personal feelings are irrelevant, and whatever your elementary school teacher said is irrelevant. And repeated attempts to "correct" other English speakers for their natural speech are just plain rude.
Rodger C said,
August 5, 2026 @ 9:28 am
"Margaret and myself's cat."
Robert Coren said,
August 5, 2026 @ 9:57 am
I don't know what I would say spontaneously, but thinking about it after reading the post, my choice would be "Margaret's and my cat".
Many years ago, when my brother was a junior or senior in high school, one of my parents made a disparaging comment about his handwriting, and he replied, "If you think my handwriting is bad, you should see Tom Strauss who sits next to me's writing."
Robert Coren said,
August 5, 2026 @ 10:03 am
@David Marjanović: Note that the reflexive usage in German is significant: in what prescriptivists would call "standard English", lie is intransitive, lay is transitive, and a literal translation of sich niederlegen would be "to lay oneself down" (cf. the traditional children's prayer that begins "Now I lay me down to sleep"). Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that in German one would never use liegen to represent an action rather than a position.
Kate Bunting said,
August 5, 2026 @ 10:55 am
Gabriel – When I hear people say things like "Me and John went to the park" and "He invited John and I to dinner". I always want to shout "John and I went!" But it's so common these days that it seems to be regarded as acceptable English.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 5, 2026 @ 11:05 am
Further to my comment above offering the paraphrase of "the cat of me and Margaret," if you ask google translate to render "Margaret and I's cat" into various other languages you get
le chat de Margaret et moi
die Katze von Margaret und mir
el gato de Margaret y mío
Note the dearth of nominative-case pronouns in the output.
But maybe the most interesting alternative is Afrikaans:
Margaret en ek se kat
That's the Afrikaans version of the so-called "his genitive," except that the relevant genitive particle in Afrikaans is invariant regardless of the number or gender of the possessor. Which makes it easy to adapt to a compound possessor.
Michael Watts said,
August 5, 2026 @ 11:42 am
These are not similar examples. "Me and John went to the park" is the natural English phrasing that children spontaneously use. It always occurs despite heavy stigma and omnipresent attempts to stamp it out.
"He invited John and I to dinner" is an unnatural phrasing that nobody would spontaneously use; it occurs specifically because of the attempts by wider society to stamp out the natural phrasing of the first example.
Michael Watts said,
August 5, 2026 @ 11:47 am
Is that one grammatically well-formed? Can you say de mío?
J.W. Brewer said,
August 5, 2026 @ 2:42 pm
@Michael Watts: I am not competent to second-guess google translate as to Spanish (or most other languages it purports to output), so I welcome the views of those who are. Including suggestions as to alternative grammatical/idiomatic ways to phrase the point at hand.
But if Spanish is anything like English, the grammaticality of "de Margaret y mio" does not necessarily turn on the grammaticality of freestanding "de mio." (Just as in English the grammaticality of "Me and John went to the park" does not turn on the grammaticality of *"Me went to the park.")
Haamu said,
August 5, 2026 @ 3:29 pm
I'm bothered by all of the offered variants. Some time ago, I consciously adopted this solution:
Perhaps the coward's way out, but it does have the advantage that it's easily tweaked for a variety of circumstances (where the referent of our is obvious; where there are multiple cats, jointly or severally owned; etc.). And, to me at least, it doesn't grate.
JK (the question submitter) said,
August 5, 2026 @ 5:52 pm
@Joe: My daughter's opinion is that hypercorrection was the cause.
Mark's first link above mentions that style guides favor "Margaret's and my cat," which seems both grammatically and euphonically satisfactory to me, and is unambiguous because there's only one cat.
JPL said,
August 5, 2026 @ 6:30 pm
"You should see the guy who sits next to me's writing": I've probably used that one. (It was flagged by the autocorrect.) "attorneys general" vs "attorney general's (decision)". "Fred and I's wedding was beautiful, as compared to Sam and me's wedding, which was a travesty" ("Fred and I"s" was not flagged.) If the pronoun is not being inflected, what is the problem with these? "my" in those cases would seem to indicate the "possession" relation applies only to that constituent; adding the possessive to both constituents seems to open the possibility that there were two weddings, not one to each other (Fred's wedding and my wedding: "Fred's and my weddings were beautiful; Sam's was a travesty"; "Fred's and my wedding was beautiful, Bill and Sara's was a travesty."). Why the inconsistency?
JPL said,
August 5, 2026 @ 6:36 pm
"Sam's and Sara's were travesties" would probably be better in the next to last example above.
wgj said,
August 6, 2026 @ 12:33 am
Isn't "I's" a standard form in some dialects of English, like Jamaican? Or isn't that only Sasha Baron Cohen's satirical version of pseudo-Jamaican?
Daniel Barkalow said,
August 6, 2026 @ 7:16 am
The 's clitic is known for attaching to the last word of a noun phrase, even if it's not a noun. For example, it appears on an idiomatically placed adjective in the totally common "surgeon general's warning", and you can get much stranger hosts with relative clauses, from "the book I wrote's title" to "the things I put up with's effects" and "the country I was a citizen of's president", where "wrote's", "with's" and "of's" would normally seem to be non-words. (Of course, these examples are poor style, since they would be clearer with "of" instead of 's, but "the person I love's cat" is probably the best way to write that.)
JMGN said,
August 6, 2026 @ 10:09 am
@wgj
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/I%27s#Determiner
David Marjanović said,
August 6, 2026 @ 10:18 am
Correct to the best of my descriptive knowledge. (Statements across all of German are very dangerous.)
Another case where English has replaced a former causative by its base verb is sink: German has sinken "sink (intransitive)", senken "lower" and versenken "sink (transitive)". There are also cases where the replacement has happened on the German side: my dialect has replaced setzen "put so that it sits" (cognate of set) by sitzen "sit", including in sich niedersetzen "sit down".
Michael Watts said,
August 6, 2026 @ 11:30 am
True, but that doesn't resolve the issue at all. Can you say y mío? (With the meaning being "and me" rather than "and mine".) There has to be something in the sentence that licenses the form. To the best of my knowledge, mío is not a pronoun (except in the sense that the English word "my" is a pronoun, which I disagree with).
The point is correct, but I would consider that example invalid. The word general in surgeon general is not commonly recognized as an adjective; whether it originated as one is irrelevant.
CuConnacht said,
August 6, 2026 @ 6:05 pm
I wouldn't be too surprised if it becomes standard. Once upon a time we said "The king's son of England" where now we would use the (arguably illogical) "the king of England's son".
Himesh said,
August 7, 2026 @ 3:47 am
I agree with NSBK, J.W. Brewer, Daniel Barkalow and Steve. Either "Margaret and I's cat" or "me and Margaret's cat" is correct, and the latter is probably more common and more natural.
The reason for the confusion is that prescriptivism is everywhere and we've all internalized its irrational and obsessions to some extent, even though of us who know it's all bullshit. That's why we're tempted to contort our mouths around monstrosities like "Margaret's and my cat" or "mine and Margaret's cat". The standard way to say this in English, as NSBK, Steve and others have said, is "me and Margaret's cat", and even "Margaret and I's cat" is a hypercorrection, though nowhere near as egregious as "mine and Margaret's cat".
We say we're free of Strunk and White but they're still in there, whispering nonsense like this. We need to do away with them once and for all.
Steve said,
August 7, 2026 @ 4:09 am
Isn't it time we all admitted the normal English way so say this is me and Margaret's cat?
The English possessive is not a grammatical case like the Latin genitive or the Old English genitive, where both I and Margaret just need to be inflected to show that they're the owners of the cat rather than the drivers or the people being picked up from the vet. If it were a case then we'd say Ben's and Jerry's ice cream or my mother's and father's house. And as CuConnacht says, we'd say the king's son of England or even the king's of England son.
We say the king of England's son because the possessive marker 's is a clitic that attaches to an entire noun phrase. When that noun phrase is me and Margaret or Margaret and I, we instinctively treat it the exact same way, giving me and Margaret's cat or Margaret and I's cat. Anything else is either a hypercorrection or prescriptivist poppycock.
Himesh said,
August 7, 2026 @ 4:10 am
I agree with NSBK, J.W. Brewer, Daniel Barkalow and Steve. Either "Margaret and I's cat" or "me and Margaret's cat" is correct, although the latter is probably more common and to my mind more natural.
The reason for the confusion is that prescriptivism is everywhere and we've all internalized its irrational and obsessions to some extent, even those of us who know it's all nonsense. That's why we're tempted to contort our mouths around monstrosities like "Margaret's and my cat" or "mine and Margaret's cat". The standard way to say this in English, as NSBK, Steve and others have said, is "me and Margaret's cat", and even "Margaret and I's cat" is a hypercorrection, though nowhere near as egregious as "mine and Margaret's cat".
We say we're free of Strunk and White but they're still in there, whispering rubbish like this. We need to do away with them once and for all.
Scott Mauldin said,
August 7, 2026 @ 9:19 am
There is a lot of prescriptivism going on in this thread. I grew up in the southern Midwest US (Oklahoma) in an environment with low educational attainment and lots of input from informal and Southern dialects, and this structure ("Bob and I's") was extremely common growing up, and certainly not rare or jarring if used by adults.
Scott Mauldin said,
August 7, 2026 @ 9:22 am
GPT says, "This is called the phrasal genitive. English has long allowed 's to attach to the end of a whole phrase rather than just a single noun:
the King of England's crown
the man next door's dog
somebody else's car
In these examples, 's is marking the whole phrase as possessive.
So from a syntactic perspective, Bob and I's isn't as bizarre as it first appears.
Is it becoming standard?
In informal speech, yes—it's increasingly common, especially among younger speakers. Linguists generally treat it as a productive feature of modern spoken English rather than a mere mistake. However, in formal writing, academic prose, and edited publications, most style guides still advise avoiding it"
Pedro said,
August 7, 2026 @ 9:53 am
This is one of the constructions that is normal in informal spoken English but not acceptable in written English. You'd never write me and Margaret's cat or Margaret and I's cat in an official document (although it would be fine in a personal email) or see it in a newspaper outside a direct quotation, and in fact there's no correct way to say it in formal written English. In formal writing the only solution is to recast the entire sentence as I just picked up our cat from the vet; she belongs to Margaret and me or similar.
This is similar to a tool that nobody knows what it's for. Informal English can tolerate the additional it but in formal English it's not acceptable and there's no correct alternative so the whole thing needs to be rephrased as a tool whose purpose nobody knows.
I think once we're clear about whether we're talking about formal or informal English it becomes easier to decide what's acceptable and what's not.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 7, 2026 @ 10:42 am
I don't think I'm being prescriptivist when I report that I find "Margaret and I's" jarring in a way that I do not find any of "me and Margaret's" or "the man next door's" or (going back upthread) "the book I wrote's" to be jarring. Something about the nominative-case pronoun appears to be blocking the affixability of the 's clitic.* What is it? I dunno. I'm more sure of what my idiolect's grammar will tolerate than of why it puts barriers where it does. Now, perhaps my idiolect would be otherwise in this regard if I had grown up in Oklahoma or some other place where the "and I's" construction may be better established.
I agree with Pedro that "me and Margaret's" might be questionable in a sufficiently formal register and that there's no obvious idiomatic alternative that fits that formal register and you'd probably need to rework the sentence more generally. I imagine people confronted with that problem might come up with a range of different ad hoc workarounds but I'm skeptical whether most people who would look askance at "me and Margaret's" in that context are going to accept "Margaret and I's."
*This generalizes beyond "I's." My ear tolerates "him's" and "them's" in a way it doesn't tolerate "he's" and "they's" if attempted to be used as possessive constructions (rather than contractions for the copula).
Michael Watts said,
August 7, 2026 @ 12:55 pm
The correct way to say it in formal written English has already been mentioned: Margaret's and my cat. This is unnatural in vernacular English, but that's not an obstacle to the formal standard.
I wanted to follow up on my remark before about word forms needing to be licensed by something. I think it's worth observing that the form of the English pronoun that requires licensing is I, not me, since me is the default.
I just happened on a good example illustrating this (for a different pronoun):
As the direct subject of a verb, them would take the special form they. But in this sentence, them is not directly the subject of the verb, so it remains in the form them.
Chas Belov said,
August 7, 2026 @ 2:36 pm
I was brought up that in an "and" phrase involving myself and another person that it was rude to put myself first. I don't remember whether this was parents or a teacher. So "my and Margaret's cat" is not something I'd feel comfortable saying, though I can't claim to never have used that construction. I'd probably say "Margaret and my cat" with the "my" overriding the need for an apostrophe s.
As for "Margaret and I's" cat, it would strike me as odd. If it's a hypercorrection, though, even hypercorrections that make it into everyday speech are English.
Chas Belov said,
August 7, 2026 @ 2:39 pm
Yes, I realize I used the me-first construction in my first sentence above. :)
I'll go back and forth as to whether I use "I" or "me" following an "and" if possessives are not involved.
Philip Taylor said,
August 7, 2026 @ 3:54 pm
"But in this sentence, them is not directly the subject of the verb …". Is the stretch of text that you quote really a sentence, Michael ? If so, what does it mean, I stumbled at "a bi/tricycles" but became totally lost at "I did not want to draw ANY FORM OF CYCLE SO COMIC-THEM GET TO WALK".
Philip Taylor said,
August 7, 2026 @ 3:56 pm
Sorry, my "what does it mean" was meant to be followed by a question mark, not a comma. Not at all sure how that typo. came about.
Michael Watts said,
August 7, 2026 @ 4:34 pm
The referent of "this sentence" is "Comic-them get to walk". It's true that this is embedded within a larger sentence and could more strictly be called a clause, but the rule for this construction is that whatever goes in it is capable of standing as an independent sentence, so I think the terminology is forgivable.
"A bi/tricycles" appears to be malformed. It isn't hard to understand (if you read the comic that it's talking about); the author means that two characters, a mother and a daughter, were each riding "cycles", the mother a bicycle and the daughter a tricycle.
They are illustrated on foot, counter to the historical event, because the author didn't want to draw a bicycle or a tricycle ("any form of cycle").
"Comic-them get to walk" then means "the versions of them that appear in the comic get to walk [instead of cycling]".
Philip Taylor said,
August 8, 2026 @ 2:12 am
Good Lord. I don't think that explanation would have occurred to me in a million years. Thank you, Michael.
David Marjanović said,
August 8, 2026 @ 7:03 am
I'm a bit surprised you already accept whose here. I was still taught to restrict it to persons, so the rephrased version would have to be a tool the purpose of which nobody knows…
But them is the direct subject of the verb get… I suppose auxiliary verbs don't count, or something?
Rodger C said,
August 8, 2026 @ 9:29 am
David M: In my English, "whose" is the possessive of both animate and neuter (as it is in German, of course, mutatis mutandis, or any other IE language). Insisting on "the purpose of which" is one of those made-up rules. "Well, 'whose' must be only the possessive of 'who,' because because because."
Michael Watts said,
August 8, 2026 @ 3:38 pm
As with Rodger C, for me the determiner associated with which is whose. Whose is not exclusively related to the pronoun who.
Do you also object to where being a standard relativizer for things that couldn't be referred to by the interrogative where?
No, the direct subject of the verb get is the compound phrase comic them, meaning "the them in the comic". The pronoun cannot take subject form unless it is the subject of the verb directly.
Tim said,
August 10, 2026 @ 10:33 am
I wonder why nobody has mentioned the words I would have chosen in such circumstances, and which all who knew me would have understood: "I have just taken our dog to the vet". All of the other variants discussed here are flawed in some way.
Haamu said,
August 10, 2026 @ 3:11 pm
@Tim — that's basically what I said above</a?.
@Chas Belov — "Margaret and my cat" has a problem: the more natural parsing has Margaret sitting in the passenger seat rather than sharing in the ownership of the cat.
@Jonathan Smith — "Sue and my" has the same problem, another reason for only partial credit.
Haamu said,
August 10, 2026 @ 3:12 pm
Sorry for the HTML flub; I'm usually more careful.