You heard it here first. For years, now, language mavens have been discussing the creep of the nominative pronoun in constructions calling for the objective case. Although voices have been raised in favor of “hypercorrection” as an explanation for this deviance, they have been mostly overwhelmed by explanations that rely on coordinate constructions. But I’m here to tell you that we have passed through the wall.
Let’s back up. Initially the concern was focused on phrases like Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s “My father John and my mother Moira … migrated to this country with my sister and I.” The “rule of prestigious deviance,” according to some, allowed for the use of the nominative (“I”) for the second member of a coordinate construction. According to this theory, perfectly rational speakers of English would say “with my sister and I” or “with…