Grammar test

[Willi]

Which is correct.
Woe is me
or Woe is I ?

[Exile]

ON LANGUAGE; Woe Is Not Me
By William Safire
Published: October 17, 1993
WEARY NEWS clerks humming "Ol' Man River" have been hauling into my office great bales of mail containing reader protests about a piece in this space on predicate nominatives.

Most people manage to get through life without bothering their heads about the predicate nominative, which is the noun or pronoun embedded in a sentence's action section after a linking verb, like mail-puller in "You are a mail-puller." But there is a breed of language lover that clasps this grammatical category to its bosom, and insists with purist fervor on the nominative "I am he" rather than the sloppily objective "I am him," which is the choice of easygoing Norma Loquendi and me.

The offending sentence was my rule: "The grammatically pristine form of 'Woe is me' is 'Woe is I' (or even 'Woe am I'), but go tell that to Ophelia and Isaiah." My interpretation of Shakespeare and the Bible held that, in this use, woe and me were one and the same, and my point was to show a long history of the use of the objective me, when formal usage would dictate the nominative I. After all, if both Shakespeare's heroine and the biblical prophet said, "Woe is me," who are the predicate nominatarians to insist on "Woe is I"?


One sack of mail set me straight on the original Hebrew. "I think the etymology of Woe is me is not a simple copulative phrase, a King James version of I am woe," writes Steve Pickering, a New York Times copy editor who has saved me from innumerable embarrassments and libel suits and otherwise drains my copy of impermissible zing. "It is rather a shortened version of Woe is UNTO me. To my mind, Woe unto me, in which me is grammatically correct as the object of the preposition unto, makes more grammatical and syntactical sense anyhow than I am woe."

Rabbi George Barnard of Cincinnati agrees: "You should leave the prophet Isaiah out of the fight. He said, 'Oy li,' which would be more literally translated as 'Woe to me.' He therefore took no position on predicate nominatives." Anne Mendelson of North Bergen, N.J., notes that "Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible renders Isaiah 6:5 as Weh mir," and Robert Frankum of Huntington, L.I., translates this passage as "Woe unto me," adding: "The me is an old dative form, and historically never was or could have been a nominative form. Semantically, then, woe and me were never one and the same, linked by the verb be, but rather me was the recipient of woe."

O.K.; I concede that the King James Version threw me off, and that the Hebrew biblical phrase should be translated as "Woe unto me," with me the object of the preposition unto. Chalk one up for the Gotcha! Gang.

Does that make me, as Prof. Caldwell Titcomb of Brandeis University writes, "incredibly ignorant"? (Some people get really worked up about this.) My less-than-irenic academic correspondent holds that in both the biblical and Shakespearean examples, "the pronoun here is not a nominative at all: it is a dative. . . . In 'Woe is me,' the noun is not being equated with the pronoun. The meaning is 'Woe is to me' or 'Woe is unto me.' " He cites Isabella in "Measure for Measure," on being told her brother is in prison, as responding, "Woe me!" without even a verb, and holds that the me here, too, is dative.

The reader who thinks this argument is getting out of hand may be asking, "What's this dative jazz?" Dative comes from the Latin data, "given," as in the phrase data Romae, "given at Rome"; it usually describes a grammatical case in which the action is given to an indirect object. When you say, "I gave him the business," the direct object receiving the verb's action is the business, and the indirect object is him. If you want to straighten the sentence out for examination, it goes, "I gave the business (to) him." Him is dative, object of the understood to.

So if you are determined to think of the me in "Woe is (to) me" as dative, object of the preposition to, you escape my "Woe is I" trap. To the loosey-goosey grammarians who want to justify "It's me," abandoning the rampart of "It is I," you reply: No fair! The me in "Woe is me" is really dative! Incredible ignorance!

I think Shakespeare knew what he was writing. If he had wanted to say, "Woe is to me," he would have said it (or if the poetic meter required three syllables, "Woe is mine"). Contrary to the opinion of all my activist-dativist correspondents, I think he did intend to equate woe and me. Sometimes the truth lies flat on the surface, and you only confuse yourself looking for "understood" hidden words. By Woe is me, he was saying "I am woe; the person of me and the emotion of woe are one and the same." It's an old and frequently used poetic device: Oscar Hammerstein 2d did it in the lyric "You Are Love."

Therefore, positeth the maven, we have an example of a pretty fair writer of almost four centuries ago using the objective case for a predicate nominative. No latter-day "understood" insertions of a preposition allowed.

I do not kid myself: at this point, relatively few of us are left in the room. It's down to the die-hard nominativniks and their dativist allies, ready to dispute this all night. Most of my normal readers have gone on to less arcane articles, shrugging at the inside-baseball struggles of the pinheaded angels of grammar, hoping this paroxysm will pass and next week we will get back to the latest Presidential gaffe.

But if you are not a Latin scholar or dative caseworker and have resolutely come this far, consider this: Just as Lieutenant Greenwald in Herman Wouk's "Caine Mutiny" defended in the end the nation's need for sailors like Captain Queeg, we can all thank our cultural stars for the legions who are absolutely certain they are keeping the language's one true faith.

They have learned their lessons from revered teachers; they have lashed themselves to the moorings of linguistic standards; they have an honorable equity in the preservation of the complicated guidelines so hard come by. Having paid their dues in lifelong respect for the rules, they can properly demand to know: Who are these permissivists -- the descriptive lexicographers, the anything-goes dialectologists, the finger-painting purveyors of common usage -- to arrogate to themselves the keeping of the temple of our tongue?

That is why it is worth wading out occasionally into the syntactical swamp. Whom do we find out (oops! Recast) -- Who is found there, guardians not always grim mingled with classicists moved to mock fury at contradictions to cherished certitudes? Who forms a chorus to challenge the solecisms of solipsistic soliloquarians? It's them. (Or, as they would say, clinging to their beloved predicate nominatives, it is they.)

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/17/ma...ted=all&src=pm

[Don1]

Woh Yoh...