A Word, Please: A situation where there are no rules

By June Casagrande

May 27, 2016 5:50 PM PT

“I and Ted watched TV last night.”

How do you like that sentence? I’m guessing that, as a literate person who’d pause to read a language column, you don’t. Neither do I. For my money, “Ted and I” is a much better way to start the sentence.

The question is: Why?

The obvious outcry prompted by “I and Ted” might be: “It’s bad grammar.”

Actually, it’s not.

“There is no grammatical foundation for the belief that ‘I’ (in a compound subject) or ‘me’ (in a compound object) must be mentioned last,” reports Grammarphobia, a blog penned by language experts Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman. “The order in which the pronouns appear is irrelevant from a grammatical standpoint.”

Grammar isn’t what most people think it is. It’s not rules for how to write properly. It’s an analysis of how the moving parts of a sentence work together. Subject plus verb, with or without embellishments, equals a sentence. That’s what grammar’s really about.

Grammar has plenty of rules, though. For example, verbs are supposed to match subjects. “We am watching TV” is ungrammatical because the subject and verb don’t match.

There are rules for forming past and future tenses. “We will watched TV” is ungrammatical because you don’t form the past tense with “will” nor do you form this future tense with a past participle like “watched” (though, of course, the future perfect “will have watched” is another matter).

Many of the habits we associate with proper use of the language have nothing to do with grammar — that is, the syntax of the sentence. Instead, putting “I” last in “Ted and I” is a convention. Etiquette, if you will.

And it’s a fascinating example of just how committed we English speakers are to certain niceties: Practically no one ever says “I and Ted.” Some would say “Me and Ted,” but that’s another matter — a controversy dealing not with the order of pronouns but with whether they’re in subject (“I”) or object (“me”) form.

If you keep object pronouns out of the discussion, there’s no controversy at all: Putting the first-person pronoun first in a case like this is practically unheard of in English.

So, if this isn’t a grammar rule, how did it become so nearly universal?

As with all things in life, it’s polite to put others first. This value seeped into the language. Plus, putting the “I” first can get awkward. “I and you should get together” is an example the Grammarphobia folks offer.

Of course, English has a long, rich history. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples dating back to the 1400s of the “I and Ted structure.” There are modern-day examples, too. But they’re rare.

All this talk about where to put pronouns was prompted by an email I received recently with the subject line “Wrong!” from a reader calling himself USC David. I had written in this column that “Talk to Mary or me” is grammatical. David was out to set me straight.

“It’s not,” he wrote. “It’s ‘Talk to me or Mary.’”

This is similar to the “I and Ted” issue. It deals with the question of where to place the first person pronoun. But interestingly, all that stuff about how it’s polite to put the “I” last hasn’t had the same impact on the object pronoun “me.” Not only is there no grammar rule for this one, there’s no etiquette rule, either. There isn’t even a standard practice.

I explained all this to David, who wrote back to tell me that I was making up rules and that I was part of the dumbing down of America. When I asked him to point me to some good sources that support his position, he told me he had deleted my email without opening it because he didn’t want to read any more of my “stupidity.”

Some people just can’t handle it when you point out to them that they are, as David would put it, “Wrong!”

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.