eagre i

“You and me are floating on a tidal wave.” –Coldplay, X&Y

I was four going on five the day I rushed into the house and excitedly gushed, “Daddy is building a playroom for my sister and…”–here I paused every so briefly, trying to remember the appropriate grammar rule–”and I,” I finished.

Those were the days when my mother, consumate grammarian that she is, did not sigh at such errors from her children. “sister and me,” she patiently corrected.

“Oh,” I said, with a dejected look. “Just girls, huh?”

This episode was hardly the shot heard ’round the house in the long and protracted battle my mother waged against the low linguistic predilections of her children. She and my father were field commander and general, respectively. My father is a teacher of history. He instilled into my siblings and…me a profound sense that words are inextricably connected to ideas, and that ideas matter. And so my mother’s constant corrections were a serious matter. We tried, we all tried to speak the Queen’s English.

If we siblings still occasionally stumble, I, at least console my mother that I am one to whom the question of my own son’s grammar is a serious matter. I am no perfect copy of either mother or father, but I am, in some sense, both of them rolled into one.

I have had long arguments with a college educated colleague over the subjunctive mood. While I would summer in Florida if I were Santa Claus, he would summer in Cancun if he was St. Nick. While we don’t know much about Geography, it doesn’t take a cartographer to see where we’re heading. English is a widely used, complex language, influenced by contact with many cultures, and many languages. Change is inevitable.

So we fight the fight one young pupil at a time, while the wide eyed English-speaking world experiments with unsightly alternative forms. “You and I speak English” gradually becomes “You and me speak bastardized English.” And as the weight of the culture squashes our tongue to broad, the Children of Those Who Do Not Correct Their Childrens’ Grammar become writers of dictionaries.

I could almost forgive some of these changes, if only they represented logical simplifications of our complicated language, instead of the cobbling on of yet more exceptions. “You and I speak English” has the advantage that it can be altered consistently to “I speak English.” “You and me speak English” cannot boast such consistency; the phrase “me speak English” is still generally only spoken by those who don’t.

We may not be able to stop the rise of complexification in English, but we can fight to ensure the language changes slowly. And there are advantages to a slowly changing language. Clear communication between a wider set of people is improved if they all speak a relatively identical language. Plus, it just sounds better.