TL;DR;
Has 'Me and whoever' long become acceptable usage in informal speech?
In the comments on this answer on ELL, I corrected the usage of "me" instead of "I".
"My boyfriend and I.. " đ
However, the original answerer1 claimed:
in informal speech 'Me and whoever'2 has long become acceptable usage. I think we've gotten over that one now đ
Emphasis mine
Fumblefingers is "fairly relaxed about such things" as they mention here, however a sample size of 1 is not really authoritative. Most other answers I found both on ELU and other arbitrary Google searches seem quite set on upholding this rule rather than relaxing it.
This ngram seems to claim the opposite. The "correct usage" seems to be growing.
Is the ngram biased as its corpus is published works and probably less informal?
Have we really got over it? It seems that there are a good deal of people who are resistant to the change in my quick search but maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
1. A clumsy word to my ears, but apparently a real one
2. I'm dying to change this to "me and whomever"!
Best Answer
Yes, itâs acceptable in informal speech.
Given a phrase like âMe and my friend went to the moviesâ, I tend to think of âme and my friendâ not as a subject but rather as a topicaliser, a natural shortening of âMe and my friend, we went to the moviesâ.
Topicalisation can be introduced explicitly with prepositions like âas forâ or âspeaking ofâ, but in English itâs usually done with fronting: stating a term at the beginning of a phrase rather than its usual grammatical position.
This can also be analysed in another way: compound subjects are not necessarily in subjective case. There are many peculiarities of inflection like this in English, in which inflections do or do not distribute into compound terms. For example, the tense of âreported speechâ is usually changed to match the surrounding phrase, thus âHe told me that he was readyâ as opposed to âHe told me that he is readyâ.
Linguistics is a descriptive field, not a prescriptive oneâthat is, linguists study how language is actually used, and devise rules for describing patterns; they do not prescribe a particular usage as grammatical or ungrammatical. That is done by individuals. A native speaker would never say âMe went fishingâ unless they were trying to sound like a caveman, but the same person would readily say âMe and Bob went fishingâ. If English-speaking people say it, it must be English, or some dialect thereof.