I know I'm a grammar nazi. This just seems to be my most recent pet peeve, so I might as well get it off my chest. The good news is that most English speakers seem to have broken their horrible habit of saying things like, "Jill and me were eaten by the alligator," instead of correctly saying, "Jill and I were eaten by the alligator." The bad news is that the price for this progress seems to be the fact that people who really should know better say maddening things like, "The alligator ate Jill and I," instead of correctly saying, "The alligator ate Jill and me."

The rule is really very simple, folks: in the subject of a sentence, use "I" as the first-person pronoun; within the predicate of a sentence, use "me" as the first-person pronoun. This can be completely intuitive to native Anglophones even if they don't want to be bothered with groking scary-sounding grammatical concepts like "objective case." The trick is to yank the other person out of the sentence (leaving only yourself) and see if still sounds right. This is what should have been taught to people who say, "Jill and me were eaten by the alligator." If you use this one tiny trick, you will always make the correct choice between "I" and "me". I suspect that most people who are not Tarzan would feel stupid saying things like, "Me was eaten by the alligator," and, "The alligator ate I."

I'm shocked at the kinds of people whom I've witnessed make this sort of mistake: well-educated people, professional editors (hi, jeff!), and self-styled amateur philologists (hi, Tycho!). The world is in a pretty sorry state if its denizens have been sufficiently terrorized by their grade-school teachers to excise the usage of phrases like "Jill and me" completely from their language even when such usage is the only correct one.

OK, fine. Maybe there are other, more significant reasons to feel sorry for the world. But still.