Full control

"Keep this between you and I," I heard one woman tell another.

"I want this for you and I," one sister told another.

"That made Elyssa and I mad," my daughter said describing an action taken by a cousin.

The above three examples don't use the grammar of textbooks, for sure.  I've seen a couple of my Facebook friends also complaining about the grammar of the mistake made above.  And, I'll never forget sitting in a teacher conference area listening to a bunch of English teachers talking and one in particular was railing against students who made the mistake above when talking to each other. Within 20 minutes, the same teacher made the exact same mistake.  Laughable, really.

Every English teacher worth her/his salt knows that me is the right choice, not I.  If a sentence requires the objective case of a pronoun like all three sentences above, then me is the correct choice. I is the subjective pronoun and never doubles in the objective position.

But what English teachers don't seem to recognize is that they don't control what people say.  So what is the pattern the people have chosen?  When using a compound object, if the first person pronoun is used, it appears second and is found in the subjective case.  The generation of Americans under 40 are pretty clear about their preference.  It doesn't match the grammar taught in schools, but that generation regularly follows their own rule unapologetically.

What happens when the people speak so clearly?  The same thing that happened when the people pronounced blood as blo-duh and spelled it blode.  Another generation came along, pronounced the word blo-o-ohd and spelled it blood.  Another generation came along and pronounced the word bluhd but declined to change the spelling.  Speakers of a language have full control over their language.  They can change it at will whenever, however they want.

The purpose of language is to communicate ideas.  People want, like, and need things, so they create a system to express those ideas.  If people understand each other, that is what matters.  Period. Without variance.  Rules change; they don't last.  If that wasn't true, all of us would still understand the English of 1380: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, and the droghte of march hath perced to the roote.  Those who stand in the way of the change get aggravated like my good Facebook friends and like the teacher in the conference room.  But language is bigger by far than the people who teach its use and/or try to control its patterns.

Long live the will of the people - the real controllers and keepers of their language.