The type of popular novel I used to devour in my teens – many of them written before WWII – often contained a passage such as the following:
She heard the front door open
“Who is that?” she called
“It’s me” he said (ungrammatically)
The (ungrammatically) was added to try to head off shoals of pedantic letters to the author pointing out that the correct form is It is I
How odd then that these days the opposite error has become almost the correct form. Few people would now use an expression such as My friend & me. It is always My friend & I.
Even in statements such as My father took my sister & I to the pictures
Only a Rasta would say My father took I to the pictures, so usage has not changed all that radically
I blame the Queen. To make it clear that Prince Philip is included, she has to use (quite correctly) the formulation My husband & I because We might mean just the royal I in her case. Somehow this just came to seem like the correct formulation, regardless of the grammar of the particular statement
