grammar girl: between you and me
Mar 28, 2010
When a song with a grammatically incorrect title becomes a smash hit, that’s a catastrophe. English teachers everywhere were surely gnashing their teeth as students sang along with “Between You and I” by Jessica Simpson in 2006. But she can be forgiven; it’s a hypercorrection heard sputtering from the mouths of many educated people.
The reason it’s wrong is that between is a preposition, and it’s a rule that pronouns following prepositions have to be in the objective case. Me is the objective pronoun; I is a subjective pronoun. Don’t worry about the details, just clear your mind of the song and memorize that the correct phrase is between you and me.
