Me, I, and why you all piss me off.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890

grammar is for blokes

grammar is for blokes

Okay, let me start by discussing the simple sentence structure of the English language. We have an SVO system in English, that is to say, a simple sentence will begin with a subject, then have a conjugated verb which may or may not be followed by an object (Japanese, by contrast, has an SOV system).

The sentence "I hit the ball" has those three parts. "I" is the subject, "hit" is the verb, and "the ball" is the object.

I have a chain of logic with this, so please bear with me; I know y'all aren't first graders.

Now, when it comes to people and the words that represent them, there are often two different words that represent the same thing. Such words are I/me, we/us, he/him, she/her, and they/them. Obviously, these words, although they represent the same things in their respective pairs, cannot be used interchangeably, so there must be a difference.

That difference is that the first word in each pair is the subjective form, and the second is the objective form. As you may have guessed, the subjective form is used when the idea represented by the word is the subject of the sentence, and the object is used when the idea is the object.

Example: I hit the ball. The ball hit me.

This is why it's incorrect to answer a ringing phone and, upon the other end asking for you, say, "This is him." You should, in fact, say, "This is he." Also, you can now understand why it's so wrong use the common phrase in its original form of, "Woe is me."

Read: Woe is I, by Patricia T. O'Conner.

Now that that's been said, we're now ready to cover the differences between "who" and "whom."

Simply put, "who" is subjective and "whom" is objective. But there is one more thing I need to add. When you have a prepositional phrase (a preposition followed by a noun or a noun phrase), the noun part is considered the object of the preposition. Because of this, one of those personal subjects will always take the objective form when it follows a preposition, as will whom. This also applies to whoever and whomever.

However, the object of a preposition can be an entire clause (a phrase with both a subject and a verb). Because of this, you can have the subjective form of a word following a preposition, as in the sentence, "He was before whoever was last." Ordinarily, you would use the objective form because "before" is a preposition, like when you say, "He was before me," but since the object of the preposition is a clause you need a subject, like in, "He left before I arrived."

This leads me to a VERY common grammatical error regarding comparisons.

WRONG: You are better than me at Stepmania.
Whenever you use "than" for comparisons, you need to realize that you will often leave out a verb that is understood.
RIGHT: You are better than I at Stepmania.
It is understood that you are saying "You are better than I am at Stepmania, but just because you don't say it doesn't mean it's not there. Just think: you wouldn't say, "You are better than me am at Stepmania," would you?

The last thing I want to cover is regarding prepositions. Technically, it is illegal (in the grammar sense) to end a sentence with a preposition. Now, this is one of the less-respected rules simply because being completely compliant with it can make for some extremely awkward sentences, and sometimes even I can't figure out how they should be worded. However, most of the time they make sentences look much better.

For example:
WRONG: She is the one I gave the present to.
RIGHT: She is the one to whom I gave the present.

If you pay attention to this rule, you'll start to notice how ugly the former sentence looks and sounds. Of course, there are some sentences which are just obscene even though they are correct. If I can think of one some time I'll put it up here. As a closing point, I'll leave y'all with a relevant quote:

"Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put!" --Winston Churchill

And thus I end my second entry.

--Guido

I'm sure Squeek could give you a more proper reasoning for why one or the other is