Shades of Gray

If you have an English grammar question, you might look it up in a grammar book or style guide. You might look it up online. And your sources may not all always agree. 

English is the only major language without an authority association that makes and keeps the rules. For Russian you have the V.V.Vinogradov Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For Spanish you have the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. For French you have the French Academy. For German you have the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache.

The lack of a real authority on the language makes for some interesting debates among English-speaking grammarians.

Bruce also researched it. He found that some sources said “other than” is a preposition and some did not have it listed as one. It means “except,” so I would assume it is a preposition as well.

However, by itself, “other” is not a preposition. And by itself neither is “than.”

I decided to consult another grammarian. I chose Ellen is at the grammar table (her Twitter handle) because she is active on Twitter and runs daily polls on grammar issues She  got her Twitter name because she actually chooses places and sits at a table in public answering grammar questions!

Well, I never got as much action on Twitter as with this post and with Ellen posting it. Here are some of the responses we got:

• “Me” sounds normal and mundane. “You and I” here feels like an idiom with an extra flavor of solidarity.
• I’ve always went by the rule that it needs to make sense in the singular, without the “you and” … in this case, I say me. (Editorial note: I’ve always went???)
• This is tricky because “than” is traditionally a conjunction, not a preposition, which would indicate the subjective “I.” But Merriam-Webster lists “other than” with this meaning as a preposition unto itself, so I would go with the objective “me.”
• only “me,” can’t see any argument for “I” 
• Other than = except , so ( me ) is correct.
• I think “me”. “Other than” is a preposition in this sentence.
• Other than, aside from, beyond, besides, apart from … all act as prepositions for me.
• Other than you and _____ (I, me), no one cares about pronoun case. (There is always a comedian!)
• Try it with a different pronoun – “Other than them” is better than “Other than they” for example. “Other than” takes the oblique case for sure.
• I tried rephrasing the sentence as ‘no one cares… except for you and…’, and then decided it should be ‘me’.
• With situations like this I usually replace the I/me pronoun with “he” and “him” to gauge which sounds more appropriate (in this case “him”), so I voted “me.”
• The tip here is to mentally drop the other person and see which pronoun you’d use.
• The absence of a verb before the comma makes “you and I” more correct. Er, does it?
• I picked “me” because I wouldn’t say “Other than I, no one cares about pronoun case.”
• not s sentence construction I would naturally use, to be honest
• Speaking, I’d say “I”; it just sounds better to my ear. In writing, I’d just change it to “us.” (There is a new rule!)

Here are the results of the Twitter poll:

I – 28.7%

Me – 61.3 %

Either one is OK – 9.2%

I wouldn’t use either one – .8%

Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with “than” taking the subjective case in comparisons:

• She likes pizza more than I (like pizza).  That is correct.
• She like pizza more than (she likes) me. Probably not correct.

In those cases, you need to supply the implied words.

Oh, American Academy of Language Rules (if you existed), is it “I” or “me”???