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“You can tell him...."

"Me tell him?”

Is this structure appropriate? Why / why not?

“Me” is usually an object pronoun. I would say that the structure is inappropriate, because “Me” is an object pronoun and here a subject pronoun should be used, in my opinion (i.e. “I”).

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  • The "Him, a hero?" construction (I can't think of the usual variant used) is a famous related one. It is an accepted idiom, has been covered by famous grammarians, and has almost certainly been covered on ELU before. I'm not sure if this is a duplicate, but it's fine in colloquial dialogue.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 16:13
  • @EdwinAshworth hi! And thank you for commenting! Could you please redirect me to a useful ELU page for the given context? Not necessarily ELU, but any other site would be helpful and I would appreciate it! Would definitely be interested to see related questions on ELU (I am trying to avoid asking a duplicate question) but I am not sure how these constructs are called so that I know how to search for them here
    – M.Ionut
    Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 16:18
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    This is closely related and will be of use: Why do we use the object instead of the subject pronoun in constructions like 'stupid me'?. // The accusative is the default case in English. Everybody says "It's us" and almost everybody "It's me" nowadays, in spite of the 'rule' forbidding it. "What, me!?" would always be chosen instead of "What, I!?", in spite of the logical expansion "What, I [should] [tell him, etc]?"
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 16:20
  • Thank you very much!
    – M.Ionut
    Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 16:21

1 Answer 1

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You're right that "me" is an object pronoun. The correct way to respond to "You can tell him..." is: "I tell him?" However, the average English speaker does not always follow this rule in general conversation.

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  • Thank you so much!
    – M.Ionut
    Commented Apr 10, 2020 at 17:08
  • Here, "Me tell him?" perhaps means, "You want me to tell him?"
    – Ram Pillai
    Commented Apr 11, 2020 at 4:31

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