ADOLESCENT LANGUAGE

[Dan I. SLOBIN]

"Between you and I" is hardly a recent change.  The New York Times
criticized Bill Clinton in his first election campaign for saying, "I
hope you'll vote for Al Gore and I."  I hear it used routinely by
academic colleagues in their 50s and younger at Berkeley.  A similar
longstanding conjunction is the use of "me and Bill" in subject position
(as opposed to "Bill and I").  There's been a good deal of linguistic
writing about these forms in English.  I doubt that they are particularly
"adolescent."

Innovative extensions of evaluative terms are also not limited to
adolescence.  Consider, for example, the spread of "arguably" in academic
and media discourse to mean something like "(probably) definitely."

-Dan Slobin