I am an assistant professor of English at a mid-sized (10, 500 students) Midwestern university. For the past year or so, perhaps because of the stress caused by an increased student paper load, I have been watching television as a means of relaxation. However, this seems to generate even greater anxiety since I am made constantly aware of the abuses heaped upon the English language. An example: while viewing The Bachelor I observed that several of the young ladies vying for the affections of Bachelor Bob used the phrase "between him and I," as in "There is a special love connection between him and I." Can you kindly explain to these women, and to anyone who will listen, why the proper usage is "between him and me"?

Yours,
Sleepless in Charleston

"Between him and me" is, indeed, the correct usage. "Between" is a preposition. When the object of a preposition is a personal pronoun, it takes the objective case (makes sense) -him, her, it, them, us, you, and, in the case of the first person singular, ME.

I explain it to my classes this way: "Take any other preposition, such as above. Would you say there is something above me or above I?"

"Above me," the students answer in unison.

"Below me or below I?"

"Below me," they chant.

"Between me or between I?"

"Between me."

That said, I'm worried that your obsession with grammar is preventing you from enjoying all of the fine programming that television has to offer. You might want to tune in to a new show called The O.C. D.. It's about a community of wealthy oceanfront Californians who speak grammatically perfect English but are still miserable. (Don't confuse this with The O.C., where the adults use terms like "booty call.")

I'm driven witless by my composition students' total inability to distinguish between "its" and "it's." I find that they either add apostrophes every time they use "its" or, conversely, do away with apostrophes altogether. What makes me tear my hair out is when they put an apostrophe AFTER "its," as in "The dog bit its' owner in the catnip aisle of PetSmart."

How do you deal with this kind of grammatical affront in your writing classes?

Sincerely,
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

I must admit that this one bothers me more than "between you and I," which occurs more often in speech than in writing and is thus more forgivable.

How do I deal with this "grammatical affront"? I tell my students it's going to be either "its" or "it's." The former is the possessive. Example: The dog bit its owner. The latter is a contraction, where "it's" equals "it is." Example: It is (it's) a bad day in English 1001.
I then put ITS' on the blackboard, followed by a drawing of a skull and cross-bones (which my students inevitably mistake for an octopus.) I then write DANGER, NEVER, VERY BAD, NOT AN OPTION EVER, NOT IN YOUR WILDEST DREAMS with arrows pointing to the ITS'. Sometimes I draw a big circle around ITS' and then put a dramatic horizontal slash through the word. This little lesson takes no more than a few minutes, which is about all I spend on specific grammar errors per class period.

Other individuals find more graceful ways of dealing with the problem. In the March 14th issue of The Chicago Tribune Magazine, Rick Kogan wrote about Robert J. Bagby, a 77-year-old self-described "nitpicker" who came up with the following limerick:

The possessive of it is just its,
But its usage gives people the fits.
They expect to see
An apostrophe,
But you shorten it is when it's it's.