#ford is an all-time fav but boy howdy he needs to work on himself

[thepringlesofblood]

UPDATE: i fully misremembered the 'grammar, stanley' scene - I thought Ford said 'he and I' (which would be wrong, and is what the original post was about) but he said 'him and me' which is fine. imo ford is still wrong though, it's a minuscule detail, and he's still lording his knowledge of academic "Standard English" over his brother who was forced to drop out of high school.

I do stand by that language is mutable and many different cultural and regional dialects use terms, phrases, and grammar that could be considered "incorrect" in "Standard English" and they're all completely valid dialects worthy of respect. Ford doesn't know this because he majored in cryptozoology and probably avoided humanities courses like the plague.

[original post below]

ok but can we talk about how when ford says 'grammar, stanley' he's fuckin WRONG? 'between me and him, i'm not always the bad twin' is a completely grammatically correct sentence.

like people do say 'between you and i' colloquially, language is mutable and many different cultural and regional dialects use terms, phrases, and grammar that could be considered "incorrect" in "Standard English" and they're all completely valid dialects worthy of respect.

but obviously that's not what Ford's doing. he's specifically referring to "Standard English", to the kind of grammar you use in a textbook. and he's wrong. when used with a pronoun, the preposition "between" takes objective pronouns (me, him) not subjective ones (he, I).

the reason people do this is usually due to hypercorrection - in trying to avoid making one grammar mistake, they make another. someone probably corrected Ford once on switching "he and i" & "me and him", maybe even in a different grammatical context, and he took that correction and applied it to everything, because he's terrified of being wrong and obsessed with appearing intelligent.

like. even if he had been right, it's a shitty thing to say, especially given the context, but i think it says a lot about Ford's character that he was wrong because he was trying too hard to be right.