5

Not a big issue, but I’d like to understand why my comment on the following question was removed. It provided a link to Google Books on the usage frequency of “you and me” vs “me and you”. Curiously, a similar comment, which is still visible, was posted afterwards.

1
  • 1
    My comment was, without seeing yours, and didn't intend to answer, rather to show Ngram is a useful resource, for general reference. Mine was posted fully expecting it to have the life expectancy of a soap bubble.
    – NVZ Mod
    Dec 6, 2022 at 7:26

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Your comment did not appear to be asking for more information or suggesting improvements. Like all of these meta questions about comment removal, the answer to your question is that answers go in the answer box, not in the comment box. Comments are ephemeral. They are not answers.

“Should I use I, me, my, mine, or myself?”

Your deleted comment read as follows:

According Google Books “you and me” is more commonly used than “me and you”, but both expression are used: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=me+and+you%2C+you+and+me+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

To me that seemed to be an answer. It also seems to be the wrong answer.

I read it as suggesting that the choice of grammatical case for a pronoun is a mere popularity contest that can be settled by Ngrams, rather than a concrete matter of subject case or object case governing the pronoun.

You cannot somehow determine which grammatical case to use by which one shows up more often in Ngrams.

I have just now added comments soliciting clarification about this from the author, and changed the close reason accordingly. I will restore your comments to a chatroom where they belong. They will not lead the asker to the correct answer by themselves.

12
  • 9
    it seems odd that a comment, which showed the OP how to perform a simple research using Ngram, is deleted because that was an answer(?) appears to have been replaced, several hours later, by a mod's comment guiding the OP how an Ngram book search can provide statistics on usage. I didn't see user 66974's comment, but I am guessing the crux of their dilemma lies here. Why is a mod's comment about Ngram acceptable but not if it comes from a user?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Dec 5, 2022 at 16:09
  • 2
    @Mari-LouA I routinely delete answers posted as comments when I see them, no matter whether they're flagged for that or not. I did that before realizing this was a dupe. I can't be everywhere, so it is unreasonable for you to expect comment deletion to be systematic. That's like complaining that upvotes are inconsistent.
    – tchrist Mod
    Dec 5, 2022 at 16:55
  • 1
    @Mari-LouA It's a broken question. It's like saying "Dear Mari-Lou, should I be using tu or te or ti for you in Italian?" It cannot be answered by Ngrams. "Oh look, I see more tu in the Ngrams so that must be what I should always be using for you in Italian" would be stupid, don't you think?
    – tchrist Mod
    Dec 5, 2022 at 17:06
  • 3
    But Ngrams are helpful to know which expression is more common: io e te, io e tu or te e io But I agree that Ngrams are not the be-all and end-all, far from it.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Dec 5, 2022 at 17:33
  • 1
    @Mari-LouA Seems more like “Should I be using te e io, or mi e tu, or te e mi, or me e tu, or tu e me, or mi e ti, or io e te, or me e te, or tu e mi, or ti e me, or tu e io, or io e ti, or mi e te, or te e me, or ti e mi, or me e ti, or ti e io, or io e tu?” I will fix up the question-close reason, but nobody can answer it right now without knowing more about the unstated context needed for a correct answer. There are just too many uncertainties.
    – tchrist Mod
    Dec 5, 2022 at 17:43
  • 2
    I really don’t see how my short comment could be taken for an answer. It was just to provide evidence on the fact that “me and you” is actually used, right or wrong as it may be (something the OP didn’t seem to realize).
    – user 66974
    Dec 5, 2022 at 19:28
  • 1
    I've lost my data-bank, but I believe it was one of the mods who said 'We use comments to provide help to people when there are strong grounds for closing the question, and we close-vote accordingly' owtte. // I don't see how 'I have reclosed this question pending clarifying edits by the asker that would allow it to be answerable' and 'this [is] a dupe' can co-exist.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Dec 5, 2022 at 19:31
  • 3
    @EdwinAshworth It's a dup but I can't tell which one. Anything having to do with correctly determining a pronoun's grammatical case has been asked here millions of times before. That's why I know it's a dup. All this silly ngrams stuff is crazy-wrong because the asker never said whether a subject or an object is required.
    – tchrist Mod
    Dec 5, 2022 at 23:17
  • 3
    @tchrist - the asker said - “But, researching all over the web, I simply can't find this term 'me and you', and instead of it, there are tons of "You and me". - The Google Books search shows the asker that what he says or thinks is not true. “Me and you” is used irrespective of the fact that it may be wrong , inappropriate, odious, irritating or what have you. For elaborating on this issue the question should be open, but probably, as you suggest, this issue has already been dealt with thousands of times before on ELU.
    – user 66974
    Dec 6, 2022 at 7:39
  • 2
    @user66974 Why in the world do you think that he is asking about using it as a subject!? Between me and you, that's complete nonsense. He didn't tell us. You're just guessing. Maybe somebody told me and you thought it was useless. Maybe it's a title. Maybe it's a subject. Maybe it's an object. Maybe it's a meaningless collocation that isn't even a single syntactic constituent. Why do we have to play guessing games all day and all night long? The asker did not ask an answerable question, but whatever his real question is, it's been asked here before. Have him tell us what he's really asking.
    – tchrist Mod
    Dec 6, 2022 at 10:22
  • 2
    I may of course be mistaken, but it seems to me IF we precede the collocation by if, that pretty much forces all matches to be syntactic subjects. And as this chart shows, we massively favour the you and me sequence there. Exactly why we do this is probably just a matter of opinion, but in my opinion people are massively influenced by the fact that nobody says, for example, I and you sometimes like to reverse our pronoun usage!
    – FumbleFingers
    Dec 8, 2022 at 12:01
  • 2
    ...and re NGram in previous comment, if I also include if you and I as a search term, the me versions (both sequences) virtually "flatline".
    – FumbleFingers
    Dec 8, 2022 at 12:04

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .