| 词组 | between you and I |
| 释义 | between you and I "What is this between you and I ... and where does it come from?" asks Simon 1980. The question is rhetorical; while Simon makes clear his disapproval, he does not dig deeply into the origin of this construction. He seems to think it the fault of sloppy modern education. He also thinks between you and I is reinforced by the conscious avoidance of me in it's me. Barzun 1985 goes further, finding the origin of the expression there: • This blunder has been the result of a well-meant but foolish conspiracy to root out the use of it's me. The wrongheaded war against that quite idiomatic, informal locution created a bugbear in the minds of the ignorant or timid, which drives them to saying I whenever they have a chance. The upshot is the illiterate between you and I.... The technical term for avoiding one grammatical trap only to fall in another is hypercorrection. Hypercorrection is mentioned as a cause or reinforcement of between you and I by several other commentators, among them Copperud 1980, Roberts 1962, and Mencken 1963 (abridged). Barnard 1979 will not accept hypercorrection as the cause, however: • But in the Stratford Grammar School where Shakespeare was a pupil, it had not occurred to anybody that English grammar needed to be taught—only Latin. Yet the Bard has one of his heroes, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, tell his friend Bassanio: "all debts are cleared between you and I." And this is not in light conversation, but in a letter written in the face of death. The most sophisticated expression of the hypercorrection theory is one of the earliest. In his New English Grammar (1892), Henry Sweet takes cognizance ofthe existence of between you and I in early modern English and credits the campaign against it is me only for reviving the older construction. Sweet suggests that the early modern English between you and I resulted from you and I being so frequently joined together as subject of a sentence that the words formed a sort of group compound with an invariable last element. There may be something to this since binary units like you and I, man and wife, are known to have syntactic peculiarities in some other languages— Arabic and German, for instance. But Sweet's incompletely worked-out notion does not explain the coexistence of between you and me in early modern English. The question clearly needs more study. Freeman 1983 mentions a completely different theory: that I is substituted for me because it sounds softer, less emphatic, and less egotistical than me. This constitutes a reversal of the theory that explains it's me on the analogy of the French "c'est moi," in which moi is called a disjunctive nominative—a form used wherever the word is stressed. Some commentators have called the me of it's me a disjunctive nominative too. We should remember, however, that the French system does not work in reverse. (See also it's me.) So for all that has been written about between you and I, little is really known about it. If Sweet's hypothesis is correct and modern use is a revival of the early modern English use, we ought not to find much in the way of evidence for the phrase from, say, the end of the 17th century until some time in the middle of the 19th century, when schoolmastering of it's me would have had time to take effect. (We find between you and I censured in Bache 1869, and Shirley Brice Heath in Shopen & Williams 1980 reports a speaker to graduates of a female Academy in 1846 advising against it.) As it happens, we do have evidence from the late 16th century, the 17th century, and the early years of the 18th century—then nothing for about 150 years. Wyld 1920 mentions examples from the middle of the 17th century but does not quote the texts. • ... it is an argument too deepe to be discussed between you and I —Thomas Deloney, Jacke of Newberie, 1597 • LADY FROTH.... For between you and I, I had Whymsies and Vapours —William Congreve, The Double-Dealer, 1694 • BELINDA. between you and I, it must all light upon Heartfree and I —Sir John Vanbrugh, The Provok'd Wife, 1697 (cited in OED, Wyld, and in Literary Digest, 27 June 1925) • CLINCHER.... for, hark ye, captain, between you and I, there's a fine Lady in the wind —George Far-quhar, Sir Harry Wildair, 1701 You might be interested to note that the examples from the Restoration playwrights here are all of what we might call the "confidential" between you and I. Curiously enough, the earliest example of this use in the OED is from 1588 and is between you and me. All of our 18th century examples have me: • Between you and me, I am often apt to imagine it has had some whimsical Effect upon my Brain —Sir Richard Steele, The Spectator, No. 118, 1711 (OED) • And, between you and me, I believe Lord North is no friend to me —Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson 1791 • Between you and me, the Lyrical Ballads are but drowsy performances —Charles Lamb, letter, February 1801 But then, in the mid-19th century, we find this: • between you and I, I believe that the secret of Ma's willingness to allow me to go to South America lies in the fact that she is afraid I am going to get married —Samuel Clemens, letter, 5 Aug. 1856 H. L. Mencken remarks that Twain regularly used between you and I until William Dean Howells took him in hand. The return of the expression to the other side of the Atlantic is attested by a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (21 Sept. 1967) who cites it as occurring in an 1896 letter of Lady Randolph Churchill, an American by birth. It is probably the "confidential" use that accounts for most modern instances of between you and I. We must believe that the use is chiefly spoken, for we have precious little evidence in print. You have perhaps noticed that Shakespeare's and Deloney's between you and I was not of the "confidential" type; it simply indicated some sort of transaction between two people. Farquhar gives us a later example: • YOUNG MIRABEL.... I tell thee, child, there is not the least occasion for morals in any business between you and I —The Inconstant, 1702 Curiously, Congreve, who used I in the "confidential" phrase, uses me in the transactional: • MRS. FORESIGHT.... Now as to this Affair between you and me —Love for Love, 1695 There is only one "confidential" use in Congreve's plays and several of the other. It is possible, of course, that Congreve is suggesting a trait of character with Lady Froth's between you and I, but it is hard to see such subtlety in Farquhar's use. So far we have dealt exclusively with between you and I, which is only the most commonly commented-upon variety of a general phrase between x and y in which x or y or both are pronouns. Shakespeare, in such constructions, almost invariably used the objective case of the pronoun, although he has one of the merry wives of Windsor say "There is such a league between my good man and he!" When the x is a proper name in later writing, we sometimes find I in the second spot: • There was nothing between Mr. Robert and I — Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, 1722 • But listen Al I don't want to be bought by Detroit no more. It is all off between Violet and I —Ring Lardner, You Know MeAl, 1916 But evidence for such constructions is sparse, and it is hard to figure out why they occur or even when they occur. A curious phenomenon is evident in these recent examples of he in the x slot: • The principal difference between he and I is stamina —Tennessee Williams, quoted in Esquire, 5 June 1979 (in Simon 1980) • Rhonda's assessment of Damn's casual attitude ... seemed to be borne out by an "interview" with him. This consisted of interrupting a game of catch between he and Brian in Opryland's parking lot — Brett F. Devan, Bluegrass Unlimited, September 1983 • ... relations between he and the two bosses are acrimonious as usual —Greg Gumbel, television broadcast, ESPN, 21 Oct. 1985 Can any conclusions be drawn from this welter of opinion and actual use? Everybody knows between you and I is wrong, but it occurred in the past and it occurs now, apparently mostly in speech. Examples in print, especially recent ones, are hard to find. There seems to be a need for someone to study binary units like you and I, he and I, he and Brian to see if they behave differently from single units. When a third item is added to between you and I as in the Irish "between you and me and John Mum" or the English and American "between you and me and the gate-post (or lamppost)," me is the usual form of the pronoun. Although the Literary Digest (27 June 1925) reported "between you and I and the bedpost (or gate-post)" in English dialect, examples in the Dictionary of American Regional English are predominantly of me, except for one late-18th-century I. Conclusion: you are probably safe in retaining between you and I in your casual speech, if it exists there naturally, and you would be true to life in placing it in the mouths of fictional characters. But you had better avoid it in essays and other works of a discursive nature. If you use it, someone is sure to notice and disparage your character, background, or education. What is more, it seems to have no place in modern edited prose. For more instances of the anomalous use of pronouns, see pronouns; who, whom 1. |
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