Quote:
Originally Posted by ernie
On the other hand you have teachers and parents correcting kids when they correctly use "Fred and me". It is not always Fred and I. In your example it is, but, for example, "He gave the tickets to Fred and I" is NOT correct. It is "He gave the tickets to Fred and me". The "trick" to knowing what to use when is the sentence should make sense if you take out "fred and". "He gave the tickets to I" is clearly incorrect.
With that said... I tend to have poor grammar when posting on message boards and will likely get caught by the grammar police soon.
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I always just kind of knew that I could sometimes use "Fred and me", but never really understood why until I took a Latin class in university and learned about case-endings and what they denote. The "accusative" case is always applied to things that are the direct object of a sentence, and there are very few words in the English language that have an accusative case (I/me, he/him, she/her are the only ones I think..). You would think it would make sense to teach children things like that so that they understand its usage, instead of just learning by rote.
Also, on the topic of hyper-correction, it seems that "-ed" has replaced the verb endings on past-tense exceptions like dreamt and learnt, which is too bad. Won't be too long until we're saying "keeped" and "weeped"
I suppose that is what is so interesting about language: it's always in a state of flux or fluidity and, though there usually are basic guidelines, sometimes you can't really impose a set of structured "rules" or applications.
EDIT: Just want to mention people using "lead" as a past-tense verb. "Lead" is not like "read"; its past-tense is "led".