Second, then Third, then First

This post is about courtesy, not necessarily about grammar.

Let’s look at a couple of rules of courtesy:

1. It’s courteous to put the listener first.
2. It’s courteous to put others ahead of you.

Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly common to hear both of these rules violated, especially by younger speakers of American English.

Examples of sloppy speech:

• “Me and you can go to the store now.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it does not put the listener first; (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“me” instead of “I”).
• “Jim, Mary, you and I should leave now.” is sloppy because it puts the listener second.
• “Send it to myself and Bob.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it puts the speaker ahead of the third person (“Bob”); (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“myself” instead of “me”).
• “I and they want the green paint.” is sloppy because it puts speaker before the third party (“they”).

Here is how the above rules of courtesy get translated into grammatical terms:

• If you are including your listener in your statement, put him or her — “second person” — first.
• Then, if you are including others in your statement, put him, her or them — “third person” — second.
• Finally, if you are including yourself in your statement, put yourself — “first person” — third.

Following these rules, we get these corrected examples:

• “You and I can go to the store now.”
• “You, Jim, Mary and I should leave now.”
• “Send it to Bob and me.”
• “They and I want the green paint.”

Summarizing the rules in grammatical terms, we get this order in which to put the people within a list in a statement:

1. Second person
2. Third person
3. First person