Is it “You said it, not me” or “You said it, not I”

Question

Is it

“You said it, not me.”

or

“You said it, not I.”

Common usage dictates that it should be “not me,” yet I cannot see the reason. If one were to turn it into a question, surely it would be:

Who said it?

The answer to which would be:

I said it. (Instead of: Me said it.)

As you suggest, "You said it, not me" is far more idiomatic. It may be that it's an elided expression such that "me" is "correct", but what words might have been elided is unclear. — Hot Licks, Oct 28 '17 at 20:29
Actually, thinking about it a bit, "Not me", as a stand alone reply ("Who broke that vase?" says Mom. "Not me" replies the child.) is idiomatic and "proper", as it is short for "It was not me". So your original sentence can be seen as employing that idiom. — Hot Licks, Oct 28 '17 at 20:33
Possible duplicate of "Who wants ice-cream?" — Should I say "(not) I" or "(not) me"? — Arm the good guys in America, Oct 28 '17 at 20:50
“Who will help me plant my wheat?” “Not I!” said the dog. “Not I!” said the cat. “Not I!” said the pig. — Xanne, Oct 29 '17 at 00:03
"You said it, not [first-person singular pronoun]" is a set phrase—indeed it verges on being a catch phrase—so the way English speakers handle "not [first-person singular pronoun]" within this particular phrase does not necessarily follow from the way they handle "not [first-person singular pronoun]" in other settings. Consequently, this question is not a duplicate of questions about the more general case of "not [first-person pronoun]." — Sven Yargs, Oct 29 '17 at 02:39

Sven Yargs · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-29T09:21:37.407

A Google Books search for "you said it, not me" yields 36 unique confirmable matches (punctuated in various ways)—all in books published between 1993 and 2015. (By "confirmable matches," I mean matches that show the actual language in the match window of the search results.)

A similar search for "you said it, not I" yields six unique confirmable matches, including one in a translation of Sophocles' Electra and another in an updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, all in books published between 2000 and 2013.

These results suggest several things.

First, writers have used both forms of the expression, but "you said it, not me" is considerably more common than "you said it, not I" in the Google Books search results.

Second, if the expression has become a set phrase, it has done so fairly recently, since the earliest instance of either form of the expression in the Google Books search matches is from 1993.

Third, the tendency to use "you said it, not me" is especially common in popular fiction. The oldest instance of the expression appears in Jackie Collins, American Star (1993), and the vast majority of the other 35 books in the set of matches are likewise mass-market novels—A Good Man Is Hard to Find (2011—not the one by Flannery O'Connor), Her Outback Commander (2011), The Dragon and the Rose (2014), Rogue with a Brogue (2014), etc. In contrast, only two of the six instances of "you said it, not I" are from murder mystery/torrid romance novels—The Twelve Days of Seduction (2012) and Saved by the Viking Warrior (2014).

If you want to say, "you said it, not me," you'll have lots of company among speakers of colloquial English. If you want to say, "you said it, not I," you can reflect that Anne Carson and Michael Shaw chose the same wording in their translation of Electra (2001) when faced with the question of which version (if either) to put into Electra's mouth during a heated exchange with Clytemnestra.

score -1 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 28 '21 at 19:57

The mere existence of a majority of a given usage, much less that it sounds pleasant, does not make it right. In neither of the following modified cases, would one exchange "I" with "me": "You said it, but I did not say it" or "I did not say it; you said it." "You" and "I" are the subjects of the two compound sentences, where each fragment stands on its own.

"You said it, not me" cannot be separated, and the verb "said" is implied in the latter fragment and, therefore, is incorrect usage (i.e., "me not said it"). Having written all that, common vernacular, sometimes, makes things acceptable. Be uncommon! ;)

Is it “You said it, not me” or “You said it, not I”

2 Answers2