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I've received an email from a native English-speaking colleague containing the following bit:
Can anyone help with the request? If so, let George and I know.
It really seems wrong to me, and I want to change I for me. What is the correct way and why?
aglearner
Posted 2018-06-11T19:59:53.483
Reputation: 615
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You are correct; the proper way to phrase it is Let George and me know.
To understand why you're correct and your colleague is wrong, imagine that we took "George and" out of the sentence. Would you say Let I know? Definitely not! You would say Let me know. So only George and me is correct.
As for why your colleague got it wrong, it's probably because of hypercorrection, which is trying so hard not to make an error that you make a different error instead. ("I vs. me confusion" is #5 on that page!) Children often seem to say "Jenny and me went to the pool", and then they are scolded by adults who tell them "It's Jenny and I", and then they grow up thinking that it should always be "X and I", when the real lesson is about whether the pronoun is in the subject position ("Jenny and I went to the pool") or the object position ("You should come with Jenny and me").
stangdon
Posted 2018-06-11T19:59:53.483
Reputation: 25 636
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The highly regarded "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" (2002) rejects the application of the term "hypercorrection" to the "...and I" construction. See FE's answer to Between you and {“me” or “I”}?
– sumelic – 2018-06-11T22:46:39.347@sumelic - Very interesting. I suppose it comes down to the old "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" debate, but I have trouble regarding it as "a variety of Standard English", given that nobody would ever say "The award was given to I"... – stangdon – 2018-06-12T15:59:59.980
@stangdon You're assuming that the same grammatical rules apply to case in coordination, but there is no evidence to support this assumption, and in fact it turns out there is very strong evidence that this is not correct. See for example Thomas Grano's 2006 thesis, “Me and her” meets “he and I”: Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns. – snailplane – 2018-06-19T03:08:27.370