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Comments

billy

Yes, that's definitely what it's about and what you've described is classic hypercorrection showing that the speaker is using a variety she/he's not comfortable with, which leads to the conclusion that David Cameron is not using his first language when speaking here. There's good experimental evidence about the different responses to 'I and David' etc. Even stronger evidence that the 'David and I' 'rule' is unnatural in some way is that 'David and we' and 'David and he' are less acceptable than 'David and I'. Will post more references later (off to teach now) B--)

Kate Scott

I've always thought that this particular hypercorrection stems from speakers being over careful about not using 'me' in subject position in utterances like 'Me and David went to the cinema'.

Even though it's something that native speakers (at least in my dialect) say all the time, it seems to be a favourite with prescriptivists. It's right up there with 'less' and 'fewer'...

This '"me"=bad' feeling then seems to carry over to when it is (correctly) in object position.

I've always found it interesting that while 'Me and David...', David and me...' and 'David and I...' are all generally judged acceptable by (non-prescriptive) speakers, 'I and David...' is always always judged as unacceptable. Any ideas why?

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