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I'm an engineer, and I'm writing an email that includes the following sentence (emphasis added for this question):

We need to let marketing weigh in on the naming of this feature, as an engineer (i.e., me) came up with the current name.

My personal rule for secondary personal pronouns is that I try restructuring the sentence to put the pronoun in the primary location and see what works. For the above, that would be:

We need to let marketing weigh in on the naming of this feature, as I came up with the current name.

This implies that the correct version of the first sentence would be:

We need to let marketing weigh in on the naming of this feature, as an engineer (i.e., I) came up with the current name.

... which sounds awful to this American ear.

What pronoun should I be using here? Or, should I avoid the issue by restructuring the sentence (and to heck with the perhaps forced levity)?

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    It's quite clear and correct just to use an appositive: '... the naming of this feature, as an engineer (myself) came up with ...'. In informal chat, 'ie me' sounds less pompous. Nov 12, 2016 at 14:29
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    Unrelated to the question of what pronoun to use, I disagree with your usage of "i.e.". "I.e." means "that is to say", not "namely" or "specifically". The Latin abbreviation for "namely" is "viz.". Nov 12, 2016 at 15:29
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    Agree with Edwin. You might consider, "We need to let marketing weigh in on the naming of this feature, as an engineer (yours truly) came up with the current name." That would preserve your levity in an unforced manner while sidestepping the use of i.e. and the issue of I versus me. Nov 12, 2016 at 15:58
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    @Kodiologist But ie is also used the same way as the now archaic viz: "The abbreviation i.e. stands for Latin id est, which means in other words and separates two versions which mean the same, the first version being typically more compact." [Editage insights] // This Grammarphobia article emphasises this. Nov 12, 2016 at 17:16
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    Shouldn't there be a comma after i.e. ? I thought that was the preferred usage, though I always have an odd pause when writing or typing it. For the main issue, (i.e., me) sounds better to me than (i.e., I)
    – R.S.
    Nov 13, 2016 at 11:04

3 Answers 3

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I feel that the entire sentence is awkward and poorly worded. A better structure might be: "We need to involve marketing in the naming of this feature as it was an engineer, yours truly, who suggested the name."

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...because an engineer (I myself) came up with the current name.

This is an appropriate place to add "myself" for emphasis and clarity, and the "i.e." is redundant in this parenthetical note.

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Just a suggested re-wording of the sentence:

Because I (an engineer) came up with the current name, which might appeal to other engineers but not to a wider range of users, perhaps we ought to let marketing weigh in on with another name for this feature.

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