2

Is it "No one will notice but you and me" or "no one will notice but you and I" ?

Tom Ver Hoef
  • 47
  • 1
    (You should be able to conclude from the answers at the linked question that you should say "... but you and me".) – Hellion Jan 30 '15 at 18:01
  • @Hellion: That's true, as is the converse ("You and I* will notice, but no-one else will"). But so far as I'm concerned, although Fengyang's comment here is plain wrong, many otherwise perfectly competent speakers would be quite happy to use "you and me" as the subject. And many speakers who aren't as competent as they'd like to think they are would use "you and I" in OP's object* context (mistakenly believing that "I" is always "more correct"). Personally I think the grammarians's concept of "correctness" here is a sterile debate - it's what people actually say that counts. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '15 at 18:19
  • @FumbleFingers, if it's what people actually say that counts, then our efforts to inform them are of the utmost import; the more we can get them to say what we think is correct, the more correct it becomes. ;-) – Hellion Jan 30 '15 at 18:27
  • 1
    Please, FF. It is not a "grammarians concept". It does not come from grammarians. I am a grammarian and I can tell you authoritatively and officially that the concept of grammatical "correctness" is total bullshit, useful for racist and ethnic baiting, but for nothing else. Grammarians are not responsible for it. – John Lawler Jan 30 '15 at 18:27
  • @FumbleFingers: You're right. I didn't notice that "but" was a preposition in this context. – Fengyang Wang Jan 30 '15 at 18:38
  • Wait, what? So @JohnLawler, after getting 55k+ reputation on English SE you're telling us that there are no correct grammatical answers? It's all grammar anarchy? – Digital Chris Jan 30 '15 at 18:44
  • @John: Okay - can I call them "language mavens" then? I got that one from Pinker years ago, and it's always stuck in my mind (but I never knew the word maven in any other context, and I've only just looked it up in OED, to be surprised on finding it's normally a positive attribution). Even so, there are some constructions which might seem "credible" to a non-native speaker but completely "wrong" to every native speaker. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '15 at 18:47
  • 1
    (or shall I just fall into line with my daughter, who calls them *grammar nazis*?) – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '15 at 18:49
  • @DigitalChris: I'm saying that "correct" grammar is The Man. And those who advocate it are ignorant. That doesn't mean there aren't any rules; obviously there are. But they're not "correct" any more than the law of gravity is; they're self-enforcing like the law of gravity is. They're descriptions of what people actually say, not what The Man thinks they should, for some unknown and irrelevant reason. – John Lawler Jan 30 '15 at 18:50
  • @FF: They're peevers. Grammar Nazi is synonymous but ruder, both pragmatically and semantically. Peeving, i.e, attempting to correct other people's language usage without invitation, is a species of what we now call assholic behavior in the States. – John Lawler Jan 30 '15 at 18:51
  • @John: I suppose grammatical principles are better than rules. I distinguish "how standard English is taught to young native speakers in school" from "analysis of how English works". I don't normally expect to change how I use English through either perspective, but the former are more suited to ELL than ELU, imho. In a nutshell, for OP's specific question here, I don't really care about the distinctions and justifications. I use both. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '15 at 19:02
  • I think the following question is more relevant than the supposed "duplicates": “Nobody will help you but me” vs. “Nobody will help you but I” – herisson Nov 22 '16 at 23:46

2 Answers2

0

This hinges on whether the word "but" is interpreted as a preposition or a conjunction.

If "but" were a conjunction, then the sentence is a shortening of:

No one will notice, but you and I will notice.

Consider the similar case of "He works harder than I." as a shortening of "He works harder than I work." Under this interpretation, "I" is preferable to "me".

On the other hand, if "but" were a preposition, then "you and me" is clearly an object. Perhaps this interpretation is more natural to most. The use of "but" as a preposition is widely accepted by dictionaries (see for instance wiktionary).

In light of this, I would personally prefer the construction "you and me" because it seems more modern and is less likely to attract attention. However, I would not consider either construction wrong. Use whichever is more appropriate for the context.

Fengyang Wang
  • 103
  • No, this hinges on what people generally say. Anglophones – perhaps most of whom wouldn't dream of interpreting 'but' here as any particular part of speech. I'd personally use 'No one but you and I has turned up' but never 'No one but we ...'. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 31 '15 at 00:17
0

These Google Ngrams seem to indicate that most people think that 'it' is

No one but us will ...

rather than

No one but we will ....

These Ngrams, for 'know but you and me'; 'know but you and I' might be interpreted as showing that

'No one will know but you and me'

is much preferred to

'No one will know but you and I'.

One could extrapolate further to the situation with OP's examples.

Edwin Ashworth
  • 83,272