I was listening to the song Superman by Eminem. I've listened it before many times but from the time I've started learning English grammar I am getting confused while reading or listening English. This time I got stuck at the line "Too much pride, between you and I
Not a jealous man but females lie". The phrase "between you and I" always sounded correct to me. But recently I learned that me is only used as an object and hearing that phrase sparked my head. Then I searched over the net and found on English Language stackexchange that it is actually a hypercorrection. Wikipedia says,
"…according to many grammarians and stylists a pronoun in a prepositional phrase in English is supposed to be in the oblique case… …though there is still disagreement on whether the phrase itself in today's language is grammatically correct or not."
My first question is, why is there a disagreement? Don't we always use the object form in the oblique case? If not then what are those cases?
Secondly, I want to know how common the phrase "between you an I" is? Is it used colloquially by common native English speakers. By common speakers I mean who don't bother grammar. I searched on http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ and got some results, e.g. this. I found the phrase in another song — here. Is it a common mistake among native English speakers or is it used to give some special linguistic affect? I think this phrase has some linguistic affect that is why the singer would have given the name of her song "Between You and I". Because no one would like to use incorrect English in the title of a song, it must have some purpose.
Best Answer
"Between you and me" is historically correct, but many native English speakers -- perhaps especially my fellow Americans -- do not know this. I suspect that the confusion comes from the fact that "you" and "you" are indistinguishable, so people get used to "You and I" as a subject and then use "you and I" as an object. This is not helped by the fact that there is much emphasis placed on correcting "you and me" (and "me and you") as a subject into "you and I".
The disagreement I think comes mostly from descriptivists who say that whatever is understood and commonly used becomes correct.
In addition, song lyrics push the limits of acceptable grammar often, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just because -- as in your example -- it makes a better rhyme. We have an idiom of "poetic license" which is used to excuse grammatical as well as factual inaccuracies in the name of art. See also for instance "Say a little prayer for I" in which the object (properly "me") is changed to "I" for a rhyme even in the absence of the word "you".