Give some ground to the pedants in the 'I/me' battle

Readers have had a furious argument on our letters page over whether we should say "less affluent than me" or "less affluent than I".

Some have argued that "than" is a preposition and the pronoun following it should be the accusative "me". Others have said that "than" is a conjunction (or possibly an adverb) and requires the nominative "I".

One reader said that anyone who had learnt Latin would know that "I" was correct. Another said the fuss proved the parts of speech some of us learnt at school were not "fit for purpose".

We can dismiss the argument that Latin tells us what we should do in English. Our language is English, not Latin. English has taken much from Latin and its romance offspring, particularly French, but it has Germanic and other roots too.

English has its own grammar, which people have been warring over for centuries - with the "I/me" battle one of the bloodiest, as Douglas Wulf of George Mason University, outside Washington DC, explained in an entertaining article in 2012.

Mr Wulf was called in by a high school to adjudicate after an "I/me" dispute between a parent and a teacher turned so rancorous that the principal and school board became involved.

The teacher had been discussing what pronoun to use after "he is taller than". (Height comparisons are as important to high school students as affluence comparisons are to Financial Times readers.) The teacher said that while many grammar books insisted on "I", people often used "me".

The furious parent arrived brandishing that mainstay of US writing, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, which mandates "I".

The problem with sentences such as "he is taller than I" is that almost no one uses them. Mr Wulf cites a corpus-based study that looked at large amounts of written and spoken English and found that "than" was followed by a bare "I" in only 2.5 per cent of cases.

So those who insist on "he is taller than I" are lexical freaks.

Is Strunk and White wrong? No. The Elements of Style did not advocate the use of "I" on its own. It said writers should also use the "understood" verb that those who insist on the "I" form often leave out.

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Having said that, I usually opt for the spelt-out "he is taller than I am" form. Why? Because I know I will not upset those who insist that "than" has to be followed by the nominative. They will concentrate on my argument rather than my grammar.

It is the same with infinitives. There is nothing wrong with splitting them. Those who insist it is bad are the same tiny group who are trying to squeeze English into Latin.

But unless not splitting the infinitive results in an awkward sentence, I leave it unsplit. So do writers on The Economist, whose style guide says that while the ban on split infinitives is pointless, "to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it".

Oliver Kamm, the Times columnist, regards this as pusillanimous. In his enjoyable book Accidence Will Happen, he advocates sticking it to the sticklers rather than giving in. "A more fruitful response is to explain the origins of this bogus rule and thereby lift from the complainer the burden of ever following it again," he writes.

The problem is that most objectors do not complain. They simply assume you do not know the rules. And if they do complain, unless you are a newspaper columnist, you do not get the chance to set them straight.

Most people, when they write, are applying for university places or jobs or contracts that will keep their companies going. And most of the people who read what they write are not grammar historians but people with their own linguistic shibboleths.

I would not give a job to anyone who confused "its" and "it's", even if Kamm points out that "it's was a possessive until the 19th century."

You never know when you are going to cross what we can call someone's "stickling point". (I had hoped to claim authorship of this term but Ian Mayes of The Guardian used it in 2000.)

You can argue with many supposed grammar rules, but it is best to know what they are and to break them only when you are sure it is not going to do you any harm.

[email protected]: @Skapinker

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