Does this answer your question? Is there a polite way to help students improve their English, or should I not try?

Somewhat, but to be clear, I'm talking about mistakes from native speakers, not ESL students.

A lot of people are using something I call "twitter english" these days. Even here, on occasion. In the US, at least, many college students are required to take a writing course, so they should know better.

I think this would be received better if presented as striving for formal English, rather than correct English. The first is something that's a goal in many professional settings, whereas the second walks the line of prescribing how English works even if native speakers don't always use it that way. For example, I would say that "me and X met" is common enough now to be essentially acceptable grammar, but it may be more "informal" than desired in a professional setting. This would become especially an issue if certain 1/2

demographics had their math grades affected by their backgrounds, such as if they speak in African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or what some call """ghetto talk"""). It's not wrong, just not formal. 2/2

If you're correcting "We will proof it's property" into "We will prove its property" on a math discussion, I would say, go ahead, since that affects comprehension, and it is crucial for discussing the math. But the example you gave is not a good example. It could be like Drake said, differences between American English and AAVE, and OP will (rightly) be called grammar police if OP used terms such as "correct English" for correcting that.

Regarding the particular grammar problem in the question, unfortunately paywalled: nytimes.com/2021/10/22/opinion/pronouns-english-grammar.html

Thank you for your comments. While I respect the opinions of those of you expressing a disdain for prescriptivism, I personally believe that education and discourse would benefit from a return to it. While I am aware language evolves over time and that some situations are clearer than others, I disagree with the descriptivist inferences some of you have drawn from it. In any case, I did not come here to ask whether I should teach grammar, but how to do so in a way that students would appreciate.

You do have some obligation to teach your students correct information. “Me and X met” is not a mistake, because it is grammatical. If you want to do direct students to write “X and I met”, you should do so in accurate terms (for example, by describing it as a convention preferred by some people in formal writing).

Everyone gets to choose whether they prefer or expect prescriptivist grammar. But it is a fact established by research that prescriptivist grammar increases bias against people from lower socioeconomic classes and against people for whom English is not their first langauge. So when people make their choice for prescriptivism, they should do so in full awareness of the negative discriminatory impacts of their choice.

Henry, that is not true. "Me and X met" is ungrammatical because "me" is, and exists to be, an objective pronoun. Some informal constructions such as "It's me" are so common as to go unnoticed, probably because predicate nominatives sometimes feel like objects due to their position, but when you use "me" in the subject position, not only is it ungrammatical, it sounds strange. You would never say, "Me met..." It's barely better when you insert "and X."

@Jeh From a formal linguistic perspective, me is not in fact an objective pronoun; rather, it is an oblique pronoun, characterised by being used in all non-subject positions. Constructions such as ‘Me and X met’ and ‘It’s me’ are in fact common in marked-nominative languages, English being an example of such. It is true that *‘Me met…’ is ungrammatical, but cross-linguistically it is extremely common for coördinated subjects to use different morphology to non-coördinated subjects.

(That being said, I personally prefer ‘X and I met’. But that is personal æsthetic preference, and I would not ask anyone else to do the same.)

bradrn, what sample is used to come to that conclusion? For example, if you were to use a corpus that includes the collective works of Cookie Monster, you might come to the conclusion that "I" and "me" are completely interchangeable. Linguistics is descriptivist by definition, but the prescriptivist does not regard popular usage as being the sole determiner of grammatical standards.

@Jeh Why dost thou use the plural "you" to refer to a singular person here? That is ungrammatical to mine eyes.

Or how about this: in the clause "the student would understand my pedagogical intent", you used the pronoun "my" in the object of the verb "understand", even though "my" is for the subject of a verb and "mine" is for the object (e.g. "my intent is mine"). So your same logic insists that what you wrote is ungrammatical, and should instead be "the student would understand mine pedagogical intent". But that fails your "it sounds strange" test, I suppose, and that's really what's behind it, not the supposed logic. And to the vast proportion of people, "me and X met" doesn't sound strange.

Or perhaps you like the old-fashioned usage like "mine intent" so it doesn't sound strange enough to you. How about this: "my car is blue and yours is red" is wrong according to your rule, because "yours" is for an object whereas "your" is for a subject (e.g. "your rule is yours"); so the "correct" form must be "my car is blue and your is red". But I simply cannot imagine any competent user of the English language giving that the thumbs-up.

kaya3, I actually think the pronoun system of older English is better, but that genie can't be put back in the bottle. My claim isn't that language doesn't evolve, but rather that despite that, there are in certain situations clear distinctions between what is correct and what is incorrect. You're mistaken about "mine." It was used in place of "my" before words starting with vowels. In your sentence, "My intent is mine," it is not an object, but a predicate nominative in the possessive case.

@Jeh ‘what sample is used to come to that conclusion?’ My own native-speaker grammaticality judgements, supplemented by some reading as to which constructions are most common in marked-nominative languages. My point is that æsthetic preference and grammaticality are two completely different things, and it is invalid to confuse the two.

Are you talking about native speakers or international student who are non-native English speakers?

"Me and X met" is certainly grammatical, in that it is an expected utterance from a native speaker. How else should "grammatical" be defined? It's perhaps not the prestige variety of English, but other varieties of English (and there are many) are equally valid (and equally complex: AAVE, for one example, has some very subtle rules about tense and aspect which are lacking in prestige English).

bradrn, I understand the point you're trying to make, but you are essentially doing the same thing I am doing. By your own admission, some constructions like "Me met" are ungrammatical, which means that a random speaker, even if a native one, cannot habitually use those constructions and claim to be speaking grammatically. The only difference between you and me is that my threshold is much tighter.

@curiousdannii only for Cookie Monster.

@curiousdannii: In what variant of the English language is "Me and X met" correct. The pronoun "Me" is an objective pronoun. It can't be used as the subject of a sentence.

@Flydog57 Native speaker of English here, born and raised in England; "me and X met" is grammatical to me and probably everyone else here I know, other than potentially a few stuffy types who none of my friends would invite to a dinner party. You have it backwards: I can use "me" in the subject of a sentence like "me and X met", and in fact I just did, demonstrating that it is possible. Therefore, since "me" is not exclusively used as an object of a verb, it is not only an "objective pronoun".

@kaya3 I'm a Canadian native English speaker, who's lived in the US for the past 30 years. Do you ever say "me met someone"? I'm guessing no. That's because "me" is an objective (or object) pronoun. A quick internet search confirms my belief. My elementary education was during the 1960s and the rules were very clear at that time. I somehow doubt they have changed. Just because something doesn't sound wrong to the ear of a native speaker, doesn't make it right. English does have rules

@kaya3 I believe you meant whom none of my friends would invite. If we're being stuffy and all :p

Which (the ongoing death of whom) is actually a perfect example of the point you are making, of course: grammar is defined by usage (how else?) and what was wrong then is not necessarily wrong today as very, very few of us would insist on whom in modern English and, I bet, even among those who do, many will forget it when speaking naturally.

@Flydog57 Out of curiosity, would you say "It is me" or "It is I" in response to the question "who is it?".

@Flydog57 No, indeed I don't ever say "me met someone", but I do (and many people do) say "me and X met someone". If you want to do a "quick internet search" to check, Google Ngrams is worthwhile: I searched for "me and you met", "me and him met", which use the so-called objective pronouns, and "he and i met", "you and i met", which use the so-called "correct" pronouns.

I don't know if this will come as a surprise to you, but Google's corpus only has the two "incorrect" versions and no results for the two so-called "correct" versions. books.google.com/ngrams/…

So yes, English does have rules, much like physics has rules - if your understanding of those rules is incompatible with reality, then your understanding is wrong, you don't get to say that reality is wrong.

@kaya3 You might have better luck if you turn on "case-insensitive." It's not surprising there aren't many results if you don't capitalize "I." Not surprisingly, the correct versions far outnumber the incorrect ones.

Well that's an unhelpful user-interface design, where it says "case insensitive" on the screen but it's not doing a case insensitive search!

Nonetheless, you've got this backwards. You've started from a rule that says "me" is an object, and therefore deduced a rule that says "me" can't be a subject, and therefore you define everyone who says "me and him" (which is a lot of people) as incorrect because they violate your rules. But you claim your rules make sense because "me" sounds wrong as a subject without the "and". But it doesn't sound wrong as a subject with the "and", so you're overgeneralising.

It's a logical fallacy to say that because "me" can't be the subject in the sentence "me met someone", therefore it can't be the subject (or part of the subject) in any other sentence either. If you're saying your rules aren't arbitrary because they're based on what "sounds right", then your rules are inconsistent.

You could equally well invent a rule saying "me" is a flooglewotsit pronoun meaning it can be either the object of a verb, or be joined by a conjunction to make a clause which is the subject of a verb. And that rule sounds more complicated, but it more accurately describes how English is actually used by people who speak English and who are considered to speak English well by other people who speak English.

@kaya3 I think I've been consistent in saying that that "Me and X met" does sound incorrect to me, though apparently it doesn't sound incorrect to you.

@kaya3 The rule that "me" acts as an object is also based on the history of the language. "Thou me hear" and "Thee I hear" have two different meanings, even though the word order is retained, so the function of using different words for subject and object is to make the meaning of the sentence clear. If "me" is not restricted to be the object, then this information-bearing functionality disappears.

@kaya3 In Modern English, word order has largely supplanted these roles, which may explain why these rules have been so easily disregarded as to give us constructions like "Me and X met."

@Jeh In old English, modern English and many other languages coordination often blocks case assignment. You cannot rationalise a grammatical sentence out of being grammatical because it does not appeal to your sensibilities. The grammar does not care about your sensibilities. This is similar to how you cannot rationalise the internal organs of a human into symmetry.

I think we're missing the point by arguing over particular grammar rules and "prescriptive" vs "descriptive". If I were allowed to write an answer, I would say: "focus on the effectiveness of the communication". This is the goal of grammar rules. When someone asks, "what's the point of grammar, as long as they understand what I mean?" that's a good question. The answer is: "by using standard grammar, you are making sure that you are communicating effectively".

It's very important in any field, mathematics included, for students to learn that the person that reads their writing, whether formal or informal, is not them. While the student knows all about what they want to communicate, the reader knows nothing aside from the words that were written. They need to put themselves in the reader's place and ask themselves if what they wrote is clear.

I have had to read MANY communications that were perfect grammatically, yet impossible to understand, without a lot of re-reading, thinking and guessing the writer's uncommunicated assumptions. I would much rather read an email starting "me and her" that is clear and concise, and doesn't waste my time trying to understand, than a grammatically perfect email that is unclear.

So in your position, I would focus only on the emails that you had to spend extra time on to figure out what they were trying to say. By writing in this way, the student is unnecessarily taking up your time. If you get an unclear email, either ask them to clarify (explaining what you could not understand) or summarize the unclear part with a clearer version (e.g. "what I undestand you are asking is....")

this way it comes across not as a "correction" but as a "restatement". They will still get the idea (hopefully) that if they had written it clearer in the first place, you would not have had to clarify, and it also gives them an example of a clearer version, which they can learn from.

"The rule that "me" acts as an object is also based on the history of the language." The more accurate rule, that "me" acts as either an object or, when joined with a conjunction, can act as a subject, is also based on the history of the English language, because historically "me" has been used as a subject when it is joined with a conjunction; that is not a new phenomenon.

I also wonder what you would think about a sentence like "me and my wife's house is painted red". In that sentence, either you parse it as "(me) and (my wife's)", denoting that we both own the house, or you parse it as "(me and my wife)'s", denoting that the two of us together own the house. Either way, "me" is not the object of a verb, but would you really prefer either "(my) and (my wife's)" or "(my wife and I)'s"? It just sounds so obviously wrong to say "my and" or "I's".

@kaya3 You'll never match "he and i met" in Google ngrams without clicking the Case-Insensitive button! books.google.com/ngrams/…

@JoelFan This should be an answer; I completely agree with this. ‘Me and X’ may be stylistically unfavourable, but it doesn’t matter as long as it communicates intent successfully.