deepest scorn for the use of hypercorrections, there has been a remarkable degree of intransigence regarding between you and I. Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage, which is one of the more flexible and thoughtful of the modern prescriptivist guides (he has a five-point scale for usage, ranging from “rejected” to “fully accepted”), labels it “widely shunned.” In the 1975 edition of Harper’s Dictionary of Contemporary English, 97 percent of the respondents on their usage panel voted against using this phrase in speech, and 98 percent said they would eschew it in writing. This is a tricky issue for many people because it requires that one has either learned this grammatical rule well enough that it can be followed without any thought or it requires constant vigilance since using the nominative pronoun I would be correct in many similar circumstances. After all, if you can say “You and I both think Shakespeare is terrible” why can’t you say “Between you and I, Shakespeare is terrible”? Because the offending I in between you and I follows a preposition (between), and pronouns that follow prepositions are objects of it and so should be in the objective case. If it makes it easier to remember, you can try using a different preposition, such as through; saying, “We were playing basketball and he drove right through I” sounds quite wrong, while “he drove right through me” does not. Some linguists have argued that there is a certain degree of historical precedent for accepting between you and I. The phrase, while fairly common in writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shifted to occurring mainly in speech for much of the next two centuries, before being adopted again in writing as a hypercorrection. But the people who care about keeping objective and nominative pronouns in their proper place tend to be quite adamant about this matter and are unlikely to be swayed by an argument that is based on “If it’s good enough for Shakespeare it’s good enough for me.” I’M GOOD Do not say “I feel good”; say “I feel well.” —A. Mortimer Clark and Jaxon Knox, Progress in English, 1931
“I Got You (I Feel Good)” —James Brown song, 1965
Everyone has met the I’m-well corrector at some point or other. This is the person who asks, “How are you?,” hears you respond, “I’m good,” and then proceeds to make you feel less so by correcting your supposed error: “I think you meant to say ‘I’m well.’” Why do they do this? I don’t mean to ask, “Why do these thinly smiling people always seize opportunities to denigrate the speech of others?,” although that is a valid question. I mean, what is the reason such people believe the phrase “I’m good” is grammatically flawed? Specious grounds. The logic behind this is that good is an adjective and since it follows a verb it should properly be an adverb. That sounds fine, so long as you avoid the basic way that English functions. The verb in question (to be) is another of those vile copulatives that we read about in “I vs. Me.” Copulative, or linking, verbs can be followed by an adjective (what in this case in called a participle adjective).