On the many and varied uses of "I"

"Witzig, what are you thinking?" your mind plagues you. The title is tongue-in-cheek; I promise.

I is used for one purpose only: It is the subject. Nothing is ever given to I. You don't go anywhere with I. And, certainly, nothing is I's. I is not an object of a preposition, a direct object, an indirect object, or a possessive form.

Saying You should come with she and I isn't formal; it's wrong. You should come with her and me is the sentiment (and the syntax) you seek.

We should all be thanking our lucky stars that we don't have to sit here and try to go through nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases as we compose our thoughts. (Who doesn't love a good declension, though? I know my sisters and fellow former Latin students do.)

Instead, if I need to pause, I can think of it this way: If I am doing something or feeling some way, I will use I, the nominative case, the subject. If something is being done for me, toward me, with me, to me, etc., I will use me, the objective case. If something belongs to me, I will use my or mine.

Myself is used as a reflexive pronoun or an intensifier. However, it is never the subject: Aaron and myself went to the store. Nope. I don't see myself going to the grocery store today. Yep. And it's never solely the object: You can give your fantasy football money to myself is incorrect. I myself will contact the commish displays the intensive property of myself. Hint: Double up! If you don't hear yourself using another matching first-person form in your sentence, it's not right. Don't be afraid to use me!

Beatles fans, I Me Mine has nothing to do with declensions.

On Witz & Wams

I'm sorry, Internet.

I was going to have another grammar post for you on Monday, but what I thought was Date Night turned into Engagement Night. I trust you will forgive me for the delay in posting and for the non-grammar topic that follows. (The banner at the top there does say I might talk sports 'n' love sometimes.)

On Saturdays, Aaron and I wear our white and blue, shriek as Penn State runs it up the middle on third-and-long, and roar heartily when our defense pounces. On Sundays, he dons his Cunningham shirt and I my Polamalu jersey. The dog is smart enough not to choose sides — given her name, though, I think we know her leanings — and we constantly check our fantasy teams' stats.

My name is Monica Witzig, and my fiancé is an Eagles fan.

And we tag-team dinner. And we read in bed. And we scream-laugh at Archer. And we put whiskey in our tea. And we find General Sherman look-alikes at baseball games. And we go hiking. And we sing to Metallica in the car. And it's perfect.

On abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms

Abbreviation, initialism, and acronym are frequently used interchangeably, but the terms are not identical in meaning and function.

If you abbreviate something, you shorten it. We see this most often in addresses: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue becomes 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Your old basketball coach, who was an admiral in the Navy, is Adm. Lippert. You probably abbreviate Latin terms every day, with et cetera used as etc. Abbreviation can refer to any shortened form, so initialisms and acronyms are also abbreviations.

Where it can get hairy is in distinguishing initialisms from acronyms, but this is because most people were never taught the difference. When you use a letter from each word of a lengthy organization or term (Young Men's Christian Association, chief executive officer) and actually pronounce each as a separate letter (YMCA, CEO), you have an initialism. An acronym is the word resulting from combining the letters of the abbreviation: NASA. Sometimes, these acronyms become so commonly accepted that they are recognized as words, e.g. scuba.

Stephanie McMillan's cartoon displays "The Initialism Of Wretchedness." (And don't call it an acronym!)

On "verbal" vs. "oral"

We see this everywhere, most especially in job descriptions: "We seek someone with excellent written and verbal communication skills."

What the employer really wants, though, is someone who can both write and speak well: "someone with excellent written and oral communication skills."

The difference between verbal and oral is this: Verbal involves words, as opposed to actions, photos, substance, etc.; oral involves the mouth, speaking.

[If you want to talk about the noun "verbal," we can do that some other time when we're diagramming sentences. In the meantime, you keep your gerunds to yourselves.]



Remember, on your SATs, that you were graded separately on the math and verbal sections. The math was, well, numbers — and the verbal was reading, writing, vocabulary: words. I'd be willing to put money on it that you didn't talk during your exam. This section was aptly named. Good on ya, SAT.

Anything to do with words is inherently verbal, but if you specifically reference speaking, make sure you recognize that it is oral. That said, saying someone is funny is an instance of verbal, but laughing is not —although laughing could be considered an oral response. Have I confused you yet? Laughing didn't involve words, written or oral, so it was not verbal. It is almost one of those "a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square" situations: "You're so funny!" is verbal because it's words, but if you send that as a text to Dad instead of saying it to Dad, it is only verbal and not oral.

[Thanks, Towson, for the image.]