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the nominative even when it directly follows the verb. “She gave it to mother and me,” “she took all of us children” and “he paid her and me” would probably sound quite as correct, to a Knight of Pythias, as the forms just given. And at the other end Charters and Lardner report such forms as “I want you to meet he and I” and “it is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the baby.” I have noticed, however, that the use of the nominative is chiefly confined to the pronoun of the first person, and particularly to its singular. Here again we have an example of the powerful way in which I asserts itself. And superimposed upon that influence is a cause mentioned by Sweet in discussing “between you and I.” 87 It is a sort of by-product of the pedagogical war upon “it is me.” “As such expressions,” he says, “are still denounced by the grammars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in writing. The result of this reaction is that the me in such constructions as ‘between John and me’# and ‘he saw John and me’# sounds vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I.” Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still more.

Following than and as the American uses the objective form of the pronoun, as in “he is taller than me” and “such as her.” He also uses it following like, but not when, as often happens, he uses the word in place of as or as if. Thus he says “do it like him,” but “do it like he does” and “she looks like she was sick.” What appears here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun only, are not adverbs, but prepositions, and that they should have the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other prepositions have. Just as “the taller of we” would sound absurd to all of us, so “taller than he,” to the unschooled American, sounds absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. “As her” was used by Swift, “than me” by Burke, and “than whom” by Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, “than him” is grammatically correct and logically necessary. 88 For example, compare “I love you more than him” and “I love you more than

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