An ‘I’ for a ‘my’: why we’re terrified of getting our grammar wrong

Jonathan Agnew recently described off-the-record interviews as those where you agree that it’s ‘between you and I’. Last month, Jess Phillips tweeted that she had ‘read a few wild accounts of Boris Johnson and I in the lobby’. And a Times journalist wrote about someone who had ‘made Jenny and I feel so welcome’. All three are articulate, intelligent people. And yet all three wrote ‘I’ where they meant ‘me’.

It’s happening more and more. The only explanation can be self-doubt. Give any of these people a second to think about it, and they’ll reply that yes, of course they should have said ‘me’. It’s easy to work out: just remove the other person from the sentence. You’d never say that so-and-so ‘would make I feel so welcome’. Yet somehow the ‘I’ epidemic is spreading. People hear others saying it, and begin to feel — against everything they know — that they should say it too.