Hi, Mark!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

 AH>  What I hear Mark saying is that the word "me" indicates
 AH>  the receiver of an action, not the person who caused the
 AH>  action.

 ml>  yes... maybe my response would have been better written as

 ml>  "I" did something. "me" can't do anything.


          I agree that quotation marks help to clarify the meaning when you're
reproducing in writing what your mother said aloud.  Folks who haven't met her
in person can only imagine the subtleties in pitch, timing, and emphasis which
she would have used... but the punctuation gives the reader a "heads-up".  :-)



 ml>  i dunno... my mother used to get me with that saying when
 ml>  i'd use the wrong form...


          I had never heard it before.  But I reckon it was an age-appropriate
explanation, for you at least, because you got the picture eventually....  ;-)



 ml>  then i learned to flip them around or shorten them and see
 ml>  if they made sense...


          I did the same myself, and often recommended it to my students.



 ml>  so now we have the proper form which would be

 ml>  he went to the store with her and me.

 ml>  or have i really frakled that up being sans c0ffee and
 ml>  having only ~5 hours of sleep?


          No, you're quite right.  Whether or not you knew the terminology you
saw a pattern... and you recognized "her" & "me" as objects of the preposition
"with".  I've had students over the years, though, who seemed to be hung up on
what an adult said when they were +/- eight years old.  They would insist e.g.
that words used to name abstract ideas can't be nouns because Miss Grinch said
nothing about them, or that moss grows only on the north side of trees because
their Daddy said so.  And I see how the older guy I mentioned earlier may have
"overcorrected" in response to an exchange like this:

             Johnny:  Him and me went to the store, and...
             Parent:  No, Johnny, you should say "he and I".

I could tell him until I'm blue in the face that "between" is a preposition in
this context, locate it in the nearest dictionary, and add further examples...
but as Sherlock Holmes said, emotion tends to interfere with logic.  No matter
what his chronological age I see a child who's terrified that the grownups who
are important to him will disapprove if he says "him" &/or "me" again....  :-Q




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)