Okay, it's not a headline worthy of anything bigger than a blog (and a very minor blog, at that), but then, it has a lot to do with why some people have problems supporting certain candidates. Some of us remember when we watched our parents grimace as Jimmuh Cahtuh pronounced the weapons he was working to defund as "nuculah submarines". And some of his biggest supporters, these days, are among the crowd who dog Dubya for talkin' about "nucular capabilities".
But this isn't about idiosyncracies in dialect. This is about abuse of the English language. In the news, of late, is the trouble Joe Lieberman has been having in his home state, in his campaign for reelection to the Senate. His opponent, Ned Lamont, has portrayed him as a Bush-kissing neo-con toady, all due to his support for the defense of freedom in Iraq. I'm not averse, myself, to a little over-the-top campaign rhetoric, especially if it divides the Democrats in, say, California, but for once there is a truly rational, centrist man in the party (not a wildly erratic speaker such as Zell, but still an old-school responsible Democrat), and he's being dragged away from his job by whiny weenies who oppose anything the Republicans do, regardless of whether or not their opposition will harm the country or the world, regardless of whether or not it falls in line with their supposed principles.
Worse, Lieberman's opponent has come out and said there are other ways in which he thinks he is leftist-superior to stolid, sane Joe. Unfortunately, I never found out what those ways were. There Lamont was, on the FoxNews tv screen the other day, and he said, "There's a big difference between he and I."
Well, that just tore it. Mom, Dad, and I started in on the grammar lesson nobody has bothered to offer to Lamont: "It's 'between him and me,' dipstick." "Yeah, the difference is that Lieberman doesn't butcher the language." "Keeee-rist, what happened to good grammar?" We never heard the rest of what he had to say, although it would have been fun to shred his grasp of logic the way we can shred his grasp of language.
So let me offer Lamont a little hint from a grammar-snob-offspring-of-grammar-snobs. You're communicating more than you think when you take linguistic liberties. You're saying you don't really care about simple rules. That's not a good sign. Fix the way you speak, and you may actually get some folks outside the flaming-goofball-left to take you seriously.
In this usage, you should always use the objective case -- that is, "he" and "I" are the subjective forms of their respective pronouns. Oh, hell, let's put it into terms I had in sixth grade, and comparable to that used in college grammar texts today: The subject is the person or thing which does whatever the sentence says is being done (with the exception of when the sentence is passive, in which something is being done to the subject, but that's not important right now). The subject, therefore, is to be in subjective case. Pretty much anything outside the subject and the verb (c'mon, you know what a verb is... you've seen those PSAs) will fall outside the subjective, unless the subject and its counterpart on the other side of the verb are considered equal, like "He is the boss" ("he = boss". Simple math, there, the sort even I can do).
The subject in Lamont's sentence was "difference" (modifiers, "a" and "big"). The verb was (and let Odin now zap Mister "depends on what the meaning of" Clinton) "is". A difference exists. Now, to identify the location of the difference, one needs a preposition. So, the stuff that comes with the preposition "between", by virtue of being part of a prepositional phrase outside the subject, is the point at which to use the objective case. That is, as he stuck himself in the section of a sentence following "between", he should refer to himself as "me", and to Lieberman as "him." Allow me to demonstrate: "A big difference exists between him and me." Try saying it, now, Ned.
It's really very simple. If you're a noun or pronoun not the subject of a sentence, you're supposed to be objective. Of course, I understand it's very hard for the far left to find objectivity.
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