Hi, Mark!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:   
      
    AH>  What I hear Mark saying is that the word "me" indicates   
    AH>  the receiver of an action, not the person who caused the   
    AH>  action.   
      
    ml>  yes... maybe my response would have been better written as   
      
    ml>  "I" did something. "me" can't do anything.   
      
      
             I agree that quotation marks help to clarify the meaning when you're   
   reproducing in writing what your mother said aloud.  Folks who haven't met her   
   in person can only imagine the subtleties in pitch, timing, and emphasis which   
   she would have used... but the punctuation gives the reader a "heads-up".  :-)   
      
      
      
    ml>  i dunno... my mother used to get me with that saying when   
    ml>  i'd use the wrong form...   
      
      
             I had never heard it before.  But I reckon it was an age-appropriate   
   explanation, for you at least, because you got the picture eventually....  ;-)   
      
      
      
    ml>  then i learned to flip them around or shorten them and see   
    ml>  if they made sense...   
      
      
             I did the same myself, and often recommended it to my students.   
      
      
      
    ml>  so now we have the proper form which would be   
      
    ml>  he went to the store with her and me.   
      
    ml>  or have i really frakled that up being sans c0ffee and   
    ml>  having only ~5 hours of sleep?   
      
      
             No, you're quite right.  Whether or not you knew the terminology you   
   saw a pattern... and you recognized "her" & "me" as objects of the preposition   
   "with".  I've had students over the years, though, who seemed to be hung up on   
   what an adult said when they were +/- eight years old.  They would insist e.g.   
   that words used to name abstract ideas can't be nouns because Miss Grinch said   
   nothing about them, or that moss grows only on the north side of trees because   
   their Daddy said so.  And I see how the older guy I mentioned earlier may have   
   "overcorrected" in response to an exchange like this:   
      
                Johnny:  Him and me went to the store, and...   
                Parent:  No, Johnny, you should say "he and I".   
      
   I could tell him until I'm blue in the face that "between" is a preposition in   
   this context, locate it in the nearest dictionary, and add further examples...   
   but as Sherlock Holmes said, emotion tends to interfere with logic.  No matter   
   what his chronological age I see a child who's terrified that the grownups who   
   are important to him will disapprove if he says "him" &/or "me" again....  :-Q   
      
      
      
      
   --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+   
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)