Things I Wish People Wouldn't Say - 2

"Me Neither"

Let me first say that I'm not trying to condemn what other people say, I just want to let you know what my thoughts on the matter are.  I may also suggest an alternative that would give me a frisson of excitement if I heard it uttered by someone else.  But, as I (and others) have so often been reminded in a couple of online places, language evolves, and dictionaries should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

That said, "Me neither" annoys me.  Not so much that I would physically twitch, or spend more than a millisecond considering it.  I certainly would never go so far as to "correct" someone for saying it.

The first thing that I might do differently is the pronunciation.  I've always preferred "either" and "neither" to rhyme with "scyther", rather than "seether".  Not only does this pronunciation seem to fit with the spelling (if we consider how a German would pronouce the "ei" combination), but it reflects the origins of the words around 800 years ago.  There's an immediate problem with this though.  "Me nyther" just doesn't flow as nicely as "Me neether", which has an almost pleasant internal rhyme.  I say "almost pleasant" because I find the "ee" sound to be a bit naff, but that's tremendously subjective, and not something I'd ever realised until I started writing this.  Let's carry on saying "Me neether" for now, as I've failed to convince myself that "Me nyther" is better.

Moving onto the other word, we're presented with an obvious problem.  In my experience, "Me neither" is generally used in this sort of conversation:

"I'm not going to Olivia's party tonight"

"Me neither"

That's where the problem arises. I don't know all the correct syntactical and grammatical terms, so I'm going to try to stick to layman's terms.  "I" is the subject of the first speaker, the person avoiding Olivia's party.  So, the second speaker wants to say the same thing, using two words to convey:

"I, also, am not going to Olivia's party"

This can then be gradually reduced without losing any meaning, because it inherits so much from the first speaker's statement.

"I, also, am not going to Olivia's party"

Let's get rid of the ugly commas

"I am not going to Olivia's party either"

Let's get rid of the repeated object

"I am not going either"

I can think of a word that means "not...either"

"Nor am I going"

Let's get rid of the repeated "going"

"Nor am I"

Let's get rid of the repeated "am"

"Nor I".

So there you have it; my preferrred version of "Me neither" is "Nor I".

Not only is it grammatically correct and has no ambiguity of pronunciation, it is a syllable shorter.  The only two downsides are that it has no internal rhyme, and that it would need changing to "Nor me" if the first speaker had said:

"Olivia hasn't invited me to her party."

As I mentioned earlier, I accept that "Me neither" is here to stay, but I would love it if someone said "Nor I" just once.