Grammatical Mistake in [I]The Price of Principles[/I]

[Rutelor]

The common (but incorrect) usage trend that substitutes the syntactically correct "me" for the inappropriate "I" (in cases in which the English grammar unequivocally calls for the former) might be--as said--common, but it's just a common mistake.

I have heard deeply educated individuals claim that they avoid all usage of "me," because they feel it is impolite; this amounts to linguistic superstition. The words "I" and "me" are both correct in different circumstances. One is a subject pronoun and the other an object pronoun. It's a simple case of different morphological cases in the English language: the nominative versus the oblique.

Frequency or infrequency of usage is not what makes it correct or incorrect. Would you say in this specific case "...men better suited to the task than she?" If it sounds wrong, it is because it breaks a fundamental syntactic commandment. The obvious sentences in that case would be:

1) "...men better suited to the task than she is"
and
2) "...men better suited to the task than her."

The problem resides with the particle "than." Said word has an ambiguous syntactical role... It functions both as a conjunction, and as preposition. But not simultaneously. If you use it as a conjunction, and you decide it is there to link two sentences, then the subject pronoun (I) must follow, yes! But, you also need a verb (first example, above.) The conjunction "than" would indeed not be followed by the object pronoun (me), but it shouldn't be followed by a truncated sentence either.

However you can also argue (correctly, I should add) that "than" functions as a preposition, in which case the only possible correct usage would prescribe an object pronoun (like in the second example).