Rivera and Shakespeare: Perfect in every way

 

I'm a baseball fan, but I usually watch the All Star game anyway. Last night, as Mariano Rivera (soon-to-be-retired legendary Yankee reliever) exited the game to great fanfare and ovation, announcer Tim McCarver made the proclamation: "A man who has never received any criticism of any kind." Lucky old Mariano's mom—little Mariano devoured his vegetables and kept his room inspection-ready every moment of every day.

It made me think of Shakespeare (writer of plays for the Elizabethan stage). While he lacks a brazen enthusiast on the order of Tim McCarver, he does have his share of defenders. One of them, in hyperbolic frenzy, could feasibly insist that he, too, is "a man who has never received criticism of any kind."

This came up over at the Common Errors in English Usage Daily Entry blog a couple of weeks ago. The entry was specifically about the expression "between you and me" vs. "between you and I," with a preference for the former in standard usage. A commenter protested—rightly, perhaps—the softness of the recommendation:

Are you really saying that "between you and I" is vaguely acceptable? Does that mean that "They gave a gift to I" is also vaguely acceptable? However will we teach anyone the rules of grammar if we allow the inclusion of another person to permit "I" as an objective case pronoun?

I followed up with a comment to the effect that while English grammar requires the objective case, me, when following a preposition, in English usage there are plenty of well-educated native speakers of English who naturally say "between you and I." In written English the numbers are strongly in favor of "between you and me," but even there someone could play the Shakespeare card, noting that the Bard himself wrote in The Merchant of Venice, "All debts are cleared between you and I."

Whether he deserves it or not, Shakespeare gets all kinds of slack when it comes to grammar. It may be that grammar as we know it was not codified in Shakespeare's day, it may be that Shakespeare was very self-aware in his preference for usage over structure, or it may be something else. But there are many instances of Shakespeare engaged in usage that seems quite incorrect to us. The essay linked to above points to expressions like "more fitter" and "most unkindest," plus a seeming lack of nominative and subjective case sense to distinguish "who" from "whom."

This really comes down to the grammar vs. usage dichotomy, which actually is not normally a dichotomy at all. English usage and English grammar are quite often one and the same. But there are times you just have to play it as it lays [an ungrammatical use of the verb "to lie"] and let a feel for proper usage, rather than formal grammar, be your guide. In other words, loudly and proudly announce "It's me!" and not "It is I" when you arrive home from work tonight. Really, really do that, because there really are times good grammar will destroy you.

So by all means, study the structure of grammar, but if you never want to receive any criticism of any kind, you need to understand English usage.