About sixty-eight years ago I was sitting in a fourth or fifth grade classroom, learning that I should always say, “You and I,” and that I was never supposed to say “Me and you”. I didn’t know that right there in small town Oklahoma I was being given a double-whammy of British imperialism and English politeness.

I did know that every child was going to continue saying “me and you” outside the classroom, and I suspected that the teacher probably would too. Adults were always full of advice they didn’t follow themselves.

I also knew that the adults in my little town didn’t talk like the people on television, and certainly didn’t speak the same English that I was finding in all those books from the county library.

I’m not talking about accent. Books are silent. Whatever was written in them, echoed in my head in the same Okie accent that I spoke. Even the local newsman on KTUL Tulsa, who used different words in different places than the people in my town, did so in the same Okie accent.

The teacher said, “Never say me and you. Always say you and I.” The implication was, memorize it and don’t ask any questions.

It wasn’t even grammatical. Let’s assume that we keep the other person first and ourselves second — it is “you and I” if we are using it as subject, and “you and me” if we are using it as an object. They didn’t teach us that.

Putting the person spoken to before the speaker didn’t really have anything to do with grammar. It existed because America grew out of British culture, before the rest of the world arrived. Britain was a stratified society in which you kept your head down unless you were top dog.

Don’t step in front of your betters. Don’t complain if they cut in line. Don’t speak until spoken to. And put your betters first in the sentence.

Any stratified society is dangerous, because your place in the system is never permanent or safe. If you work hard enough, you can rise — but if you slack off, you will fall.

That’s for the upper strata. If you are too far down, you had better plan to stay there, or your “betters” will make you wish you had. We are referring to Brits in Britain, high caste Hindus interacting with low caste Hindus in India, or anybody White in the era of my childhood, anywhere near the South, talking to anybody Black.

Until recently, and maybe still, that also included women trying to interact with men.

The English politeness — you and me, but never me and you — is not a matter of Mary Poppins sweetness and light. It is a word to the wise. Never assert your own value in a stratified society. Never put yourself first. Those above you will slap you down if you do.

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In that class, I was actually being taught that grammar (in the larger sense of rules of language, both acknowledged and hidden) is what language is all about. It would be years later that I realized that an equally compelling case could be made for the idea that usage is what language is all about. Finally I came to realize that it is, and probably always will be, a struggle between those two positions.

To be short and snarky, usage is what people say, and grammar is what intellectuals tell people that they should have said.

So who cares? You do, probably, if you are or want to be a writer.

Language is always changing, and one advantage of being seventy-eight and being a writer is that I have lived long enough to see it happen. A disadvantage (from the same viewpoint) is that language always seems to move toward the more simple, at the expense of the measured, the stately, and the beautiful.

I hate it. I throw metaphorical bricks at my TV screen every evening because of the way the characters are talking.

Nevertheless, the changes are real. They reflect the language people actually speak. They make up the language you readers will expect to read.

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When I was about fourteen, I knew I wanted to go to college, and I knew that the people there were not going to speak small town Okie. I got an authoritative book of grammar, Strunk and White, and made it part of my thinking. (It didn’t help my accent, but that’s another post.)

Even then, I didn’t buy into S&W as if it were the word of God, and over the years I have found that much of their advice was not helpful. No problem. I have never read a book without muttering, “Yeah, maybe?”, from time to time under my breath.

I know now that sentence fragments are as legitimate as sentences, and are frequently a great deal more expressive. Strunk or White would slap my knuckles for that, but who cares.

Are you a writer, or a would-be writer? I can’t imagine you coming this far into this post if you aren’t. There is a great variety of English out there. Pick and choose. Make it your own. Decide who your audience is, and how far you want to go toward sounding like them.

Especially,  be prepared for more changes in the future. Like it or not, change is coming.