Just Between You and Me

I am not an English professor or a famous grammarian, but I was an excellent student of sixth grade English which included diagramming sentences. I learned about prepositions, nouns, adjectives and adverbs as well as subjects, objects and appropriate verb forms. I also studied Latin grammar in high school giving me a greater appreciation of the grammatical elements of our own language.

And while I know how busy we all are and that sometimes we lack the time to think about our use of English grammar, I cannot overlook some of the grossest forms of language abuse without writing something.

The most common error and one some think shows erudition, but doesn’t, is the phrase “just between you and I.” It is supposed to be “between you and me,” because the word “me” is the object of the preposition. The word “I” is used only as a subject of a sentence or as a predicate pronoun as in “It is I.”

Many people say “if I was you” or “I wish I was you.” Since both phrases are conditional, they must be phrased in the conditional subjunctive “if I were you” or “I wish I were you.”

Since the verb must agree with the subject, it is important to know which words are singular and which are plural. The word “criteria” is plural and so takes a plural verb like “are” or “were.” The singular version is “criterion.” (The same is true about the word “phenomenon.”) The word “alumni” is masculine plural. The singular is “alumnus.” The feminine versions are “alumna,” singular and “alumnae,” plural.

I also learned in the sixth grade that adjectives define or describe nouns. The words “male” and “female” are adjectives that describe nouns as in “a male suspect” or “a female impersonator.” Police officers are male or female as are models or firefighters. Therefore it is incorrect to say “man police officer” or “man executive.” It is also incorrect to say “woman firefighter” or “woman senator.” Saying that he is a “man doctor” would mean that the doctor specializes in treating men and could actually be a woman.

This confusion began years ago because some group decided that “female” was too male oriented. But actually, the word comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning woman, while “woman” has a male reference in it. The word “male” comes from old French male and masle and the Latin masculus.

Then there is the little-known rule that even journalists get wrong. The words “who” or “which” always relate to the noun that directly precedes them (even if the noun is in a prepositional phrase). A great New York Times journalist just wrote a column about a woman who took a lover. But she wrote “The woman married to the Duke who was seeing a commoner” meaning that the Duke was seeing the commoner.

I apologize for bringing all these common errors to your attention, but do so only to end the repetition of these abuses of our language. I never claimed to be an expert on the use of commas, they were covered in 7th grade English, so see if you can find some errors in this column. It would serve me right, wouldn’t it?


June 2008