A Word, Please: A New Year’s resolution for you and me

So how’s your New Year’s resolution going so far? Hmm. I see. I was afraid of that.

Would you like me to get you off the hook? Because I can suggest a much easier resolution that, with a little work upfront, will require zero effort for the rest of the year. The rest of your life, even. Here it is: Learn when to say “and me” instead of “and I.”

Trust me, this will put your grammar far ahead of most people’s. And it will achieve your goal of using “and I” in the first place: to speak as correctly as possible.

To say “Thanks for visiting Maria and I” isn’t wrong, exactly. Most people do, and you can continue to do so if you like. But it’s not grammatical. It’s idiomatic, meaning it has become standard and therefore acceptable.

When people say “and I,” it’s usually because they’re trying to be grammatical, proper. People assume “I” is best because, as kids, we were swiftly corrected for saying something like “Maria and me are going to the movies.” It seemed that every time we chose “me,” an adult told us we should instead use “I.” They weren’t wrong. “Maria and I are going to the movies” is the grammatical alternative to “Maria and me are going to the movies.”

But we took it too far: We got the sense that “me” was always inferior, so we started using “I” in stuff like “Thanks for visiting Maria and I.” That’s not the proper English we’re shooting for.

“Me” and “I” have different functions in a sentence. “I” is a subject: I met Maria. “Me” is an object: Maria met me. Understanding this is crucial to choosing correctly between “I” and “me.”

Luckily, you already know how to get this right every time. You never say, “Me like pizza” or “Tell I.” Because you already understand subjects and objects, you say instead “I like pizza” and “Tell me.”

Your understanding of object pronouns goes even deeper: You also understand that prepositions — little words like “to,” “with,” “at,” “on” and “in” — also take object pronouns. Instead of “Listen to I” you say “Listen to me.” Instead of “Come with I,” you say “Come with me.”

This doesn’t stop with “I” and “me.” You understand how to use every other pronoun pair including “he” and “him,” “she” and “her” and “we” and “us.” That’s why you use “tell him” instead of “tell he” and “between us” instead of “between we.” Effortless grammatical perfection.

Yet, if you’re like most English speakers, all your deep knowledge of object pronouns goes out the window when you add another person to the sentence. People frequently say things like “You should listen to Sam and I” and “You should come to the movies with Alexis and I” and, the one that even careful speakers say, “Between you and I.”

If you’re aiming for proper speech, these fall short of your goal. But there’s a simple way to get these right in 2026 and beyond: Consider the sentence without the other person.

When you want to say, “You should listen to Sam and I,” consider “You should listen to I.” It sounds wrong because it is wrong. You know it’s “You should listen to me.” Sam doesn’t change that.

Instead of “This is about you and I,” try “This is about I.” You see instantly that you need “me” here. So say, “This is about you and me.”

This trick doesn’t work great for “between you and I,” because “between” requires a pair of things for its object. In this case, you can plug in “we” and “us.” Clearly, “between we” is ungrammatical, which is how you know an object pronoun, like “us” or “me,” is the way to go.

That’s it. Just try your sentence without the other person a couple of times. You’ll soon see when “and me” is better than “and I.”

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.