What is wrong with ‘me’

Have you noticed that you don’t hear the word me that often anymore? It is a perfectly good word, but it seems that modern English has chosen to make the word appear to be grammatically incorrect. I hear people all the time saying things like “The dog followed John and I to the door” or “Do you want to go with Sheila and I to the movies?”

The Oxford Dictionary says the two personal pronouns I and me are often used incorrectly, usually in sentences in which I is being used with another noun.

A good way to test whether you want to use “I” or “me” is to take the other pronoun out of the sentence and see if it still makes sense.

Examples:

1. Frank and I went to the store.

Test: I went to the store. (Correct!)

2. Jake invited Brian and I over for dinner.

Test: Jake invited I over for dinner. (Incorrect!) It should be Jake invited Brian and me over for dinner.

So you see “me” is still a very dependable and useful word in the English language. Don’t forget about “me.” Let “me” help you be a better communicator.

To be quite honest, it seems like a lot of the world today thinks about “me,” meaning them, but doesn’t think referring to “me” in a sentence is correct. Millennials were labeled the “Me Me Me Generation” by Joel Stein in Time magazine. It is kind of ironic when you think about it. The “Me Me Me Generation” doesn’t like the word me. I guess they are too busy sharing and tagging to be bothered with little old “me.”

According to Stein’s article, “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58 percent more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.”

Stein also provides the following regarding millennials, “Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. In

1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80 percent of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility;

10 years later, only 60 percent did.”

I sure hope the “Me Me Me Generation” will be able to take care of me when I need them to. Because goodness knows I’m not getting any younger.

It is just a sign that I’m getting older when stuff like this bothers me. I should really just let this kind of thing go. I mean everybody has their own little pet peeves and I’m sure I do things that drive people crazy, just ask my wife.

To me, it is just silly when people use the wrong word in a sentence. Who wouldn’t know they should use the word me? I guess it is a by-product of a quarter century plus in the newspaper business that I notice little things like the improper use of the word me.

But I truly hate it when people ain’t using no good English.