Editing Between you and I

{{Short description|Phrase}}
{{for|the Kita Alexander song|Between You & I}}
{{Use American English|date=December 2021}}
"'''Between you and I'''" is an English phrase that has drawn considerable interest from linguists, grammarians, and stylists. It is commonly used by style guides as a convenient label for a construction where the nominative/subjective form of pronouns is used for two pronouns joined by ''and'' in circumstances where the accusative/oblique case would be used for a single pronoun, typically following a preposition, but also as the object of a transitive verb.
One frequently cited use of the phrase occurs in Shakespeare's ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]'' (1596–98). 
According to many style guides, the [[William Shakespeare|Shakespearian]] character who used the phrase should have written "between you and me".
Use of this common construction has been described as "a grammatical error of ''unsurpassable'' grossness",{{efn
|The characterization as "a grammatical error of unsurpassable grossness" is attributed by [[Bryan Garner]] to an unnamed "one commentator".<ref name="Garner"/> [[Bill Bryson]] attributes it to  [[John Simon (critic)|John Simon]],<ref name="Bryson ">{{Cite book|at=between you and I|last1=Bryson |first1=Bill |authorlink1=Bill Bryson|title= Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words |date=2002 |publisher= Crown Publishing Group |isbn=9780767910477}}</ref> who apparently used the term in reference to Tennessee Williams's alleged use of "between ''he'' and I".<ref>{{Cite book |page=18 |title=Paradigms lost, reflections on literacy and its decline |last= Simon |first=John I. |isbn=9780517540343 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=5cNZAAAAMAAJ |date= 1980 |publisher=C. N. Potter, distributed by Crown Publishers}}</ref>}} although whether it is (or was) in fact an error is a matter of debate.

==Use in literature ==
"Between you and I" occurs in act 3, scene 2, of ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]'', in a letter written in prose by [[Antonio (The Merchant of Venice)|Antonio]], the titular character, to his friend Bassanio:<ref>{{cite book|last=Bryant|first=Joseph Allen|title=Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=r0hguXIh15oC&pg=PA89|year=1986|publisher=UP of Kentucky|location=Lexington|isbn=9780813130958|page=89}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Kahn|first=Coppelia|editor=Harold Bloom|title=William Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yMppHzBFYFAC&pg=PA22|year=2010|publisher=Infobase|isbn=9781438134352|pages=19–29|chapter=The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in ''The Merchant of Venice''}}</ref> "Sweet Bassanio, ... all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death."<ref>{{cite book|last=Shakespeare|first=William|editor1-first=Gary|editor1-last=Taylor|editor2-first=Stanley|editor2-last= Wells|title=The Complete Works|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eOr2kQEACAAJ|year=1994|publisher=Clarendon|location=Oxford|isbn=9780198182849|pages=425–51}}</ref>

Writer and critic [[Henry Hitchings]] points to usage in [[William Congreve]]'s ''[[The Double Dealer]]'' (1693) and in [[Mark Twain]]'s letters.<ref name="Hitchings">{{cite book|last=Hitchings|first=Henry|title=The Language Wars: A History of Proper English|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780374183295|url-access=registration|year=2011|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|isbn=9781429995030|pages=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780374183295/page/187 187]–88}}</ref> [[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.<ref name=menner/> Writer Constance Hale notes that [[Ernest Hemingway]] frequently used pronouns this way: "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers."<ref>{{cite book|last=Hale|first=Constance|title=Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=onIbVNzLwXcC&pg=PT67|year=2001|publisher=Crown|isbn=9780767908924|page=67}}</ref>

Various critics have commented on Shakespeare's line. American writer [[Russell Baker]], in his "Observer" column in ''[[The New York Times]]'', considered it a grammatical error—"grammatically, of course, Shakespeare was wrong". He said Shakespeare probably "slipped accidentally": "My guess is that he was writing along rapidly, maybe at the end of the day when he was tired, was wishing he'd never come up with this ''Merchant of Venice'' idea, and eager to get over to the Mermaid Tavern for a beer with Jonson and Burbage".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/06/opinion/observer-a-slip-of-the-quill.html|title=Observer: A Slip of the Quill|last=Baker|first=Russell|date=6 July 1988|work=[[The New York Times]]|accessdate=25 July 2014}}</ref> Menner, in a 1937 article in ''[[American Speech]]'', says that "it is evident that the phrase ''you and I'' was often felt to be grammatically indivisible, perhaps of frequency, and that we "cannot even be sure that 'between you and I' was originally hypercorrect in the Elizabethan age"; Menner does not say whether he believes the usage to be correct or incorrect.<ref name=menner/>

Others do not accuse Shakespeare of grammatical incorrectness: sociologist [[Robert Nisbet]] criticizes "word snobs" who condemn the phrase,<ref>{{cite book|last=Nisbet|first=Robert A.|title=Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nIbX3rw-BqkC&pg=PA270|year=1983|publisher=Harvard UP|location=Cambridge|isbn=9780674700666|page=270}}</ref> and lexicographer and [[Oxford English Dictionary|OED]] editor [[Robert Burchfield]] states that what is incorrect for us was not necessarily incorrect for Shakespeare: "grammatical assumptions were different then",<ref name="Garner"/> a view shared by philologist and grammarian [[Henry Sweet]].<ref name="Sweet">{{cite book|last=Sweet|first=Henry|authorlink=Henry Sweet|title=A Short Historical English Grammar|url=https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog|year=1892|publisher=Clarendon|location=Oxford|page=[https://archive.org/details/ashorthistorica00sweegoog/page/n121 104]}}</ref> However, [[Bryan A. Garner]], who writes on usage and (especially legal) language, writes that even if the phrase was not incorrect for Shakespeare, it is and should be considered incorrect today, and cites linguist [[Randolph Quirk]]: "It is true that Shakespeare used both ['between you and I' as well as 'between you and me'], but that did not make it any more correct".<ref name="Garner"/>

==Incorrectness and hypercorrection==
The term ''[[hypercorrection]]'', in this context, refers to grammatically incorrect usage, and is typically committed by speakers (or writers) who "overcorrect" what they think is a mistake, and thereby commit an error.<ref name=menner>{{cite journal|last1=Menner|first1=Robert J.|title=Hypercorrect forms in American English|journal=[[American Speech]]|date=1937|volume=12|issue=3|pages=167–78|doi=10.2307/452423|jstor=452423}}</ref> [[Kenneth G. Wilson (author)|Kenneth G. Wilson]], author of ''The Columbia Guide to Standard American English'' (1993), says hypercorrections are "the new mistakes we make in the effort to avoid old ones", and cites "between you and I" as an example—better, he says, to say "between the two of us".<ref name=Wilson>{{cite book|last=Wilson|first=Kenneth G.|authorlink=Kenneth G. Wilson (author)|title=The Columbia Guide to Standard American English|url=https://archive.org/details/columbiaguidetos00wils_0|url-access=registration|year=1993|publisher=Columbia UP|location=New York|isbn=9780231069892|page=[https://archive.org/details/columbiaguidetos00wils_0/page/230 230]}}</ref>

For the phrase to be considered an example of hypercorrection, it has to be considered grammatically incorrect in the first place. Grammarians and writers on style who judge the phrase this way include Paul Brians,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/myself.html#sthash.mWdiSi7b.dpuf|title=I/me/myself/|last=Brians|first=Paul|accessdate=26 July 2014}}</ref> the [[Oxford Dictionary of English|Oxford Dictionaries]],<ref name=oxford>{{cite web|url=http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/between-you-and-me|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130502132702/http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/between-you-and-me|url-status=dead|archive-date=May 2, 2013|title=Between you and me|year=2014|publisher=[[Oxford Dictionary of English]]|accessdate=26 July 2014}}</ref> and [[Mignon Fogarty|Grammar Girl]]: "it's just a rule that pronouns following prepositions in those phrases are always in the objective case."<ref name=grammargirl>{{cite web|url=http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/between-you-and-me|title=Grammar Girl: Between You and Me|last=Fogarty|first=Mignon|authorlink=Mignon Fogarty|work=[[Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing]]|accessdate=26 July 2014}}</ref> A BBC survey from the early 2000s found that listeners ranked "between you and I" first in "most annoying grammar mistakes".<ref name="Yagoda"/> But many grammarians and linguists, including [[Steven Pinker]], consider the phrase grammatically acceptable.<ref name=puss/>

===Supposed causes===
The cause for this particular error is given by such authorities as a kind of trauma<ref name=grammargirl/> deriving from incorrect usage caused by "you" being both nominative and oblique, and the awareness of the possible incorrectness of "me": "People make this mistake because they know it's not correct to say, for example, 'John and me went to the shops'. They know that the correct sentence would be 'John and I went to the shops'. But they then mistakenly assume that the words 'and me' should be replaced by 'and I' in all cases."<ref name=oxford/> In ''The Language Wars'' (2011), Henry Hitchings provides a similar explanation, adding that for many speakers "you and I" seem to belong together,<ref name="Hitchings"/> which is noted also by Kenneth Wilson.<ref name=Wilson/> That the problem typically occurs when two pronouns are used together is widely recognized: "these problems rarely arise when the pronoun [I] stands alone".<ref>{{cite book|last=Manser|first=Martin|title=Good Word Guide: The Fast Way to Correct English - Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar and Usage|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6142OlLz2q8C&pg=PA157|year=2011|publisher=A&C Black|isbn=9781408123324|page=157}}</ref> James Cochrane, author of ''Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English'' (2004), gives a similar explanation—in this case, "people"'s feeling some unease with a sentence like "Me and Bill went out for beers"; Cochrane does not, however, mark it as a hypercorrection, and suggests the phrase only came about "in the last twenty or so years"<ref>{{cite book|last=Cochrane|first=James|title=Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Wjy-pG2ZIqwC&pg=PA14|year=2005|publisher=Sourcebooks|isbn=9781402203312|page=14}}</ref>—linguist J. K. Chambers, however, points out that the usage is not "a change in progress".<ref name="chambers">{{cite book|last=Chambers|first=J. K.|editor1-first=Yuji|editor1-last=Kawaguchi|editor2-first=Makoto|editor2-last=Minegishi|editor3-first=Jacques|editor3-last=Durand|title=Corpus Analysis and Variation in Linguistics|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sOKccXw8zgEC&pg=PA55|year=2009|publisher=John Benjamins|isbn=9789027207685|pages=53–66|chapter=Education and the Enforcement of Standard English}}</ref>

J. K. Chambers investigated the phrase (as well as the closely related "with you and I") in an analysis of the role of education in the grammaticality of English speakers, in this case from Canada. Data from ninth-graders and their parents indicated little regional variation, but a significant variation between children and their parents, showing children were more likely to pick the "correct" pronoun or, in technical terms, to show "[[accusative case]] concord with [[Conjunction (grammar)|conjoined]] pronouns". Chambers's explanation is that the children are likely to have had better education than their parents, and a study from 2008 of seven regions across Canada likewise showed that concord increased as the level of education increased. Chambers investigates a number of explanations offered, and accepts as one reason that the mistake occurs because of the considerable distance between the preposition and the second pronoun.<ref name="chambers"/>

===Hypercorrection, contextual acceptability===
More complex explanations than "trauma" or "unease" are provided by linguists and sociolinguists. Without expanding on the topic, Henry Hitchings considers the phrase a very specific, class-oriented kind of hypercorrection, which he calls "hyperurbanism", which "involves avoiding what is believed to be a 'low' mistake and using a supposedly classier word or pronunciation, although in fact the result is nothing of the sort".<ref name="Hitchings"/> A similar reason is given by Bryan Garner (''pace'' Chambers), who says "this grammatical error is committed almost exclusively by educated speakers trying a little too hard to sound refined but stumbling badly", and says the phrase is "appallingly common".<ref name="Garner">{{cite book|last=Garner|first=Bryan|authorlink=Bryan A. Garner|title=Garner's Modern English Usage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2xv4CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA111 |year=2016|publisher=Oxford UP|isbn=9780190491505|pages=111–112}}</ref> The notion that educated people are prone to this error is shared by Grammar Girl, who says that [[Jessica Simpson]] can therefore be forgiven (for the 2006 song "Between You and I").<ref>{{cite book|last=Fogarty|first=Mignon|authorlink=Mignon Fogarty|title=The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gDUMufuiqjAC&pg=PA20|year=2009|publisher=Holt|isbn=9781429964401|page=20}}</ref> According to legal scholar [[Patricia J. Williams]], however, members of "the real upper class" recognize it immediately as substandard; she comments that such usage easily marks one as belonging to a lower class.<ref>{{cite book|last=Touré|authorlink=Touré (journalist)|title=Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=n_tWdNU-xyQC&pg=PA185|year=2011|publisher=Simon and Schuster|isbn=9781439177570|page=185}}</ref> Sociolinguist [[Gerard van Herk]] discusses "between you and I" and similar phrases with pronoun errors (which are all incorrect according to [[Linguistic prescription|prescriptive linguists]]) in the context of [[social mobility]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Herk|first=Gerard Van|authorlink=Gerard van Herk|title=What Is Sociolinguistics|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X5mqoBAluX0C&pg=PA54|year=2012|publisher=Wiley|isbn=9781405193191|page=54}}</ref>

One of the most notable linguists to accept the grammaticality of "between you and I" is [[Steven Pinker]], even though he still calls it a "hyper-corrected solecism". Pinker's argument, in short, is that [[Coordination (linguistics)|individual elements in coordinates]] need not have the same number as the coordinate itself: "she and Jennifer are" has two singular coordinates, though the coordination itself is plural. The same, Pinker argues in ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994), applies to case, citing a famous phrase used by [[Bill Clinton]] and criticized by [[William Safire]]: "So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that [I] is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants".<ref name=puss>{{cite news|url=https://newrepublic.com/article/77732/grammar-puss-steven-pinker-language-william-safire|title=Grammar Puss |last=Pinker |first=Steven |accessdate=24 March 2018 |newspaper=[[The New Republic]] |date=24 January 1994}}</ref> Writer [[Ben Yagoda]], impressed by this argument, divides his thinking on the phrase's grammaticality in a pre-Pinker and a post-Pinker period,<ref name="Yagoda">{{cite book|last=Yagoda|first=Ben|authorlink=Ben Yagoda|title=You Need to Read This: The Death of the Imperative Mode, the Rise of the American Glottal Stop, the Bizarre Popularity of "Amongst," and Other Cuckoo Things That Have Happened to the English Language|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RfHJAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT58|year=2014|publisher=Penguin|isbn=9780698157828|page=58}}</ref> and Peter Brodie, in a special issue of ''[[The English Journal]]'' devoted to grammar and usage, is likewise persuaded: "he also reminds us that these rules are generally dictated by snobbery and conceived as mere shibboleths".<ref name="Brodie">{{cite journal|last=Brodie|first=Peter|year=1996|title=Never Say NEVER: Teaching Grammar and Usage|journal=[[The English Journal]]|volume=85|issue=7|pages=77–78|doi=10.2307/820514|jstor=820514}}</ref> While David D. Mulroy, in ''The War Against Grammar'' (2003), finds Pinker's argument not entirely persuasive, he says "these are matters on which reasonable people can disagree".<ref>{{cite book|last=Mulroy|first=David D.|title=The war against grammar|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=d_XtAAAAMAAJ|year=2003|publisher=Boynton/Cook|isbn=9780867095517}}</ref>

According to linguist [[Joshua Fishman]] the phrase is, in some circles, "considered to be perfectly OK even in print", while others accept it "only in some contexts", and yet others never accept it at all.<ref name="Fishman">{{cite book|last=Fishman|first=Joshua A.|authorlink=Joshua Fishman|title=European Vernacular Literacy|date=28 June 2010|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3VdWq-ZGv-UC&pg=PA1|publisher=Multilingual Matters|isbn=9781847694782|page=1}}</ref> Richard Redfern cites many examples of what is considered incorrect pronoun usage, many of which do not follow the "preposition + you and I" construction: "for he and I", "between he and Mr. Bittman". He argues that the "error" is widespread ([[Elizabeth II]] even committing it), and that it should become acceptable usage: "The rule asks native speakers of English to stifle their instinctive way of expressing themselves".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Redfern|first=Richard K.|year=1996|title=Pronouns Are Highly Personal|journal=[[The English Journal]]|volume=85|issue=7|pages=80–81|doi=10.2307/820515|jstor=820515}}</ref>

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, ''[[The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language]]'' differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I  knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English", while examples like "they've awarded he and his brother certificates of merit" and "... return the key to you or she" are classified as grammatically incorrect hypercorrection.<ref name="Huddleston CGEL">{{Cite book|page=463|last1=Huddleston |first1=Rodney |authorlink1=Rodney Huddleston
|last2= Pullum |first2= Geoffrey |authorlink2=Geoffrey Pullum
|title=The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language |date=2002 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge; New York |isbn=0-521-43146-8}}
</ref>

==Notes==
{{Notelist}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}

{{The Merchant of Venice}}

[[Category:English usage controversies]]
[[Category:Shakespearean phrases]]