WHOM SAID THAT? ME AND HIM WANT TO KNOW.

Language Matters

By Kristen di Gennaro

In response to my call for language pet peeves, a reader emailed about the “misuse” of

personal pronouns, as in “Me and him went to the circus today.” Noted the reader,

“It’s so simple if you remove one of the pronouns and listen to how the revised sentence sounds to your ear.”

Indeed, few speakers would say “Me went to the circus” or “Him went to the circus,”

so why are some of us OK with “me and him” as a subject in the same context?

These examples illustrate the grammatical concept of case, used in Latin and older versions of English, in which the form a noun takes depends on whether it’s the subject or object in a sentence.

English speakers gradually stopped using different endings on nouns centuries ago, but remnants of case remain on our pronouns, leaving us with “I/me,” “she/her,” “he/ him,” “we/us,” “they/them.”

As with Old English noun forms, our pronoun system remains unstable, creating variability in how speakers use them. Pronoun instability is most noticeable with compound subjects, as in “me and him” in the example above. Simple subjects “I,” “we,” and “they,” when used alone, are less likely to vary. Instead of misuse, these differences reflect non-random variation or evidence of a language

system undergoing gradual change.

The reader’s example reminded me of a social media post I saw expressing “prayers to she and her family.” Initially, this looks like another example of exchanging subject and object pronouns, but in this latter case the speaker replaces the (expected?) pronoun “her” with the subject pronoun “she.” Again, how many of us would say “prayers to she”?

Instead of defaulting to the more common (and arguably more natural- sounding) “her,” the social media poster here is probably practicing hypercorrection, similar to what speakers do when they say, “Thanks for inviting Andy and I to your party” when “Andy and me” would be the preferred form. (See my column from the Summer 2025 issue of Matters Magazine, where I

discuss hypercorrection.)

A related and much less contentious language change is the gradual loss of the pronoun “whom.” Who among us asks, “Whom did you call?” or “Whom did you see at the party?” Some speakers retain “whom” immediately following a preposition, as in “To whom should I address the

letter?” And then there are the speakers who hypercorrect here as well, as in another social media post in which someone complained that “Whomever seemed to be in charge” wasn’t doing a great job.

One of my own pronoun pet peeves is the use of “myself” where “me” works just fine, as in “Please let John or myself know your decision.” On that note, remember to email me (myself or I) with your own peeves and questions.

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Please share your thoughts on these and other language matters with your local linguist at language matters@mattersmagazine.com. Kristen di Gennaro is an associate professor

of English at Pace University, where she teaches courses in linguistics.