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The Disappearance of the "Me" Generation (Blog Menu)
I am driven to distraction these days by television and radio reporters of the "Communication Arts" Generation, as opposed to what I will call the "Me" Generation, in whose company I include myself.
Let me make my case, an oblique case, so to speak.
When I was in seventh grade English class, Mrs. Smith drilled us in sentence diagramming, the discipline of taking sentences and labeling the nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc., in sometimes elaborate sentence trees. I rather enjoyed discovering the secrets of sentences, their forms and word functions. While English classes are still taught in the public schools, they have become part of the trendy "Communication Arts" curriculum. I fear sentence diagrams have all but disappeared in the m lange of courses that emphasizes topics other than learning the rudimentary basics of our national language. The decline and imminent death of the word "me" in broadcast media is an example.
"Me" is an objective personal pronoun. An objective pronoun functions as the target of a verb, as distinguished from the subjective pronoun "I". In the past few decades broadcasters came along who got the notion that "you and me" in a sentence was somehow always wrong and started substituting "you and I" regardless of the context. "You and I are going to school together." is correct, while the sentence "The teacher teaches you and I." is not. "The teacher teaches you and me." can be parsed to read "The teacher teaches you." and "The teacher teaches me." Everyone recognizes that "The teacher teaches I." is incorrect, but broadcasters, in an effort to appear correct and sophisticated, often say "The teacher teaches you and I."
This has led to the disappearance of the word "me" and thus the end of the "Me" Generation.
Another example of not knowing the native language is the recent TV ad for a brand-name outdoor grill. The actor says "We headed for a deserted island for our BBQ." when he should have said "We headed for a DESERT island for our BBQ." From the looks of the sandy beach, it was indeed a desert, but how would he have known anyone deserted it? Perhaps the voice-over actor should have said "uninhabited island," which is really what the grill-maker meant to convey. While there are many more words today than in the year 1600, writers today have a vocabulary of only about 25% of that of Shakespeare.
Another bug-a-boo is "dearly departed," which makes no sense. Just because it seems vaguely similar to "dearly beloved," one does not depart (die) dearly. The person is the "dear departed."
There are many, many more. Perhaps you would like to e-mail your pet-peeves on the use of English in the media.
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