Me and Him Have Went Home

I’m a great fan of spontaneity and creativity in language, but there are limits. At least if you want to be taken seriously.

Notwithstanding its idiosyncrasies and myriad exceptions to every rule, the English language does have rules. Following the rules reduces your chances of being misunderstood, or worse, being taken for a rube.

“Me and him have went home” offends at least three simple rules of English grammar and usage.

First, polite speech dictates that you put the other person first, so you’d improve it by saying “Him and me”.

Second, “Him and me” are in the wrong case. Those words are objective, and you should be using subjective, namely “He and I”. Simply put, we’re doing the action, not receiving it.

Third, you have never went home. You have gone home. “Went” is the simple past: “I went home”. If you inject “have”, you create the present perfect, and need to use “gone”: “I have gone home”. It’s called present perfect because you are describing your current status in light of what has just happened.

But enough with the rules! Generally speaking, we nail grammar correctly because it just “sounds right”. However, it’s always good to know the rules which underlie “sounding right”.

And before you complain too much about English, just be grateful that we don’t have to worry much about the multiple cases, voices, inflections and genders which characterize almost every other language. And if that’s not enough, how about agglutinative languages which can stack the whole sentence into a single word? Or tonal languages, like Mandarin, where the exact same word spoken in different tones will have entirely different (and sometimes embarrassingly different) meanings. You think you have it hard? English may be a little weird, but it’s relatively simple as far as languages go.

Footnote 1: There’s a simple trick for determining the correct pronoun to use when you’re talking about multiple parties: make them walk alone. So, if you’re not sure if you should say “Share it with Susie and I” or “Share it with Susie and me”, just leave Susie out of it for a moment and see what sounds right: “Share it with me” or “Share it with I”. Easy, isn’t it? Bringing Susie into the equation doesn’t change the rule.

Footnote 2: They used to teach this stuff in Grade Seven, along with cursive handwriting (which I failed), long division and deriving square roots. But now we have apps which seem to deal with everything except my appalling handwriting.

A timely past edition: https://us12.admin.mailchimp.com/campaigns/show?id=1244105