Me and My companion

During my first zone conference in the Scotland, Edinburgh Mission, I sat in a pew at the Dundee chapel listening to my fellow missionaries offer their testimonies. There was something odd about the meeting, however: several missionaries, in mid-story, interrupted their narratives to correct their grammar. It was always the same mistake, too: “Me and my companion were tracking when—oh...uhh...sorry, President Vriens—My companion and I were tracting when….” Realizing their minor grammatical blunder, invariably the missionaries would publicly correct themselves while sheepishly addressing President Vriens. Sitting in my pew, I thought perhaps my mission president had a pronoun case agreement complex—everyone is entitled to at least one grammatical pet peeve, right?—and I made a mental note to never make this mistake in his presence. After the meeting I had an interview with President Vriens. Forgetting my pronoun promise, however, I slipped up; I said, me and my companion.

With his piercing voice, powerful and terrifying, President Vriens interrupted me midsentence: “Elder Bockholt, we never say, ‘Me and my companion.’ We say, ‘My companion and I.’” I knew then why the other missionaries corrected themselves. But why was he emphasizing the subject before the conjunction and not the misemployed pronoun? He went on, “If you put yourself before your companion, it means you’re selfish, Elder Bockholt.” So his grammar rant had nothing to do with pronoun agreement and everything to do with morality. And stop calling me Elder Bockholt, I thought. “You need to learn to put others first. Put your companion before yourself. Put your investigators before yourself. Put the Lord before yourself, Elder Bockholt. Go on, Elder Bockholt, ‘My companion and I—.’”

My encounter with President Vriens forced me to acknowledge the existence of “linguistic etiquette.” I was forced to admit, alongside grammarian Patrick Hartwell, that deviating from Proper English may have social consequences—if a person breaks the rules of Proper English he or she may be thought uneducated, unworthy, and, in my case, possibly immoral (109). Some people sincerely believe that grammatical correctness provides a legitimate measure of a person’s character. If I had said, “My companion and I spent six hours helping an elderly woman address her neglected garden,” my mission president would have believed I was a selfless, moral person. However, if I had told him, “Me and my companion spent six hours helping an elderly woman address her neglected garden,” he would have thought of me as self-interested and debased. But why? The only difference is that the first report was grammatically correct and the latter incorrect. Is grammar usage an outward manifestation of internal morality? I don’t think so—but some do. In 1757 Thomas Sheridan wrote, “A revival of the art of speaking, and the study of our language, might contribute, in a great measure, to the cure of the evils of immorality, ignorance and false taste” (qtd. in Nunan 270). Evidently, Sheridan and President Vriens would agree that my saying of my companion and I would prescriptively cure my evil dispositions. Grammar: the savior of world. Maybe that’s what John meant when he said, “In the beginning was the Word,… and the Word was God” (St. John 1.1).

What’s so wrong with saying, Me and my companion were tracting? For starters, me is an objective case pronoun of the speaker—meaning it is the receiver (object) of the action. But me isn’t receiving the tracking; me is doing the tracting. Me (alongside his or her companion, of course) is the subject of the sentence, not the object. For the sentence to be correct, I—the subject case pronoun of the speaker—must replace me. The sentence should read: I and my companion were tracting. But President Vriens would still not be satisfied with this sentence because he, like Rebecca Elliott, author of an easy-to-understand grammar book, believes “it is polite to put yourself second” (20). I and my companion were tracting is correct but not polite. My companion and I is considered both correct and polite.

Maybe, however, if correctness and politeness weren’t so intertwined, people would be more inclined to select the correct pronoun for every situation. With conjoined subjects (two subjects with and or or in the middle) some people, even highly educated people, use object forms. For instance, the sentence, Mom gave the cookie to Jim and I, is incorrect because the speaker is using the subject case personal pronoun when the speaker is the object of the sentence. If the speaker wasn’t so concerned about putting others first, he or she probably would have said, Mom gave the cookie to me and Jim, which is grammatically correct but impolite (remember your English teacher telling you that if you dropped the other person, you’ll “know” which pronoun to use; the same principle applies when you put yourself first). But the speaker has done what most of us have done: internalized the notion that it is always better to use subject pronouns—probably because our English teachers, or mission presidents, have corrected us a thousand times whenever we said, me and Jim. I can hear them now: "It's Jim and I!" For fear looking intelligently inferior, or morally decadent, we do what Barbra Birch calls “hypercorrect” our grammar; we “misapply a usage rule to instances it should not cover” (144). Maybe, if we were more selfish, hypercorrection wouldn’t concern you and I. Or maybe we shouldn’t equate grammar with morality. But I and my mission president never saw eye to eye.


Birch, Barbra. Learning and teaching English Grammar, K-12. Columbus: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.

Elliot, Rebecca. Painless Grammar. New York: Barron’s, 1997. Print.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English Feb. 1985: 105-27. Print.

Nunan, Susan. “Forgiving Ourselves and Forging Ahead: Teaching Grammar in a New Millennium.” English Journal Mar. 2005: 70-5. Print.