kathleen_dailey

Every month the Chicago Manual of Style publishes a selection of questions and answers on style and usage. Usually the subject matter is primarily of interest to working editors (the hyphenation of open compounds, how to cite a dictionary entry in author-date style, how to style the possessive of a plural acronym, etc.)--not the type of thing an author is likely to notice or care about. Sometimes, though, an entry is of more general interest.

This month, the CMOS Q&A addressed a point that's long been a source of frustration. The question and response can be found here:

Q. A few of us are curious which is the correct wording of this sentence per CMOS guidelines: “They blotted out any distant landmark, enclosing Luke and I in a foreign landscape.” Should the words be “Luke and I” or “Luke and me”?

A. “Luke and me” would be correct in that context. That’s because (as the people who write grammar books generally agree) the choice of subject or object for a pronoun used by itself remains the same when that pronoun is used with one or more additional nouns or pronouns.

So just as most of us wouldn’t write that something was “enclosing I in a foreign landscape,” we shouldn’t write that it was “enclosing Luke and I.” And though people who use “Luke and I” in this way may argue that they’re treating it as a sort of invariable compound noun, it’s still wrong. Let’s just say that many editors hope this I-as-object phenomenon fades away.

For a look at a related problem, see “‘Hazel and I’s Puppy’? When Fiction Meets Bad Grammar,” in Fiction+ at CMOS Shop Talk.

(The ghastly popular variation on that title in the article now seems to be "Me and Hazel's Puppy.")

I've had to develop a boilerplate explanation and links for this type of solecism (and for many others) that I routinely append to edited manuscripts, which usually does the trick, at least for my professional authors. (The non-professional writers of fiction, who either don't believe or weren't taught that the objective case still exists in English, are another story.) Now that CMOS has addressed the point succinctly, I'm glad to be able to add another link to the explanation. However, I'm pretty sure that the hope of the CMOS editors, expressed in the subject line above, is in vain.