IT’S time for a breakup. The person you have been seeing is lovely, but a relationship is not what you want right now. How do you break the news gently? If you say “It’s not you, it’s me,” you are probably a native speaker of English or someone with a good command of how native speakers actually speak. If you say “It’s not you—it’s I,” you will quickly achieve the goal of making the other person not want to spend any more time with you. Yet this bizarre formulation is just how Nathan Heller of the New Yorker would have you speak.

This little conundrum illustrates a great deal of confusion about English grammar. Mr Heller was reviewing Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style” (which The Economist reviewed here). Mr Pinker writes that it is normal informal English style to use the accusative pronouns—me, him, her, us or them—in a predicate after forms of the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were and so on). In other words, it is natural and correct to say It is me as opposed to It is I. A granny facing a police line-up, jangled by her recent mugging, will point to the perpetrator and naturally shout, “That’s him, officer!” And as Geoffrey Pullum, a syntactician at the University of Edinburgh, points out, there are many cases where the nominative pronoun—I, he, she, we, they—in predicate position is so weird as to be unacceptable. He gives the example of looking at an old photograph, pointing to oneself and saying This one here is I at the age of 12.

But of course many traditional grammars do prescribe it is he and so on. It is the preferred form for formal usage, and Google’s Ngram-viewer tool (which allows searches of books) finds “it was him who…” to be almost non-existent in books.

What’s correct? Writers like Mr Heller offer two principles: that language should be consistent, and that it should be logical. Mr Heller here is explicit, in a passage worth quoting at length:

It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.)

Logic and consistency are, of course, good things. But both words mean different things to different people, and sometimes the goals conflict. For Mr Heller, it is “logical” that “was” should be like a grammatical equals sign. So if the subject of the sentence It was he is nominative, so should the pronoun in the predicate be: it = he. But case systems don't care about invisible equals signs. In French, this construction is forbidden: the French say c’est moi, not c’est je, using a special set of pronouns (usually called "emphatic") rather than the nominative ones. Nobody accuses the language of Pascal and Descartes of being any less logical than English. In Danish, it is det er mig (“it is me”), using the accusative pronoun, not det er jeg (”it is I”). And yet no one says the language of Kirkegaard is a confusing mess. And it just so happens that the ancestors of the Danes and the French conquered England, contributing to the language’s mixed nature. It is me didn’t show up in writing until the 15th century, and so may not come directly from those languages. But contact between speakers of different languages did give English a habit of accepting different ways of saying things, such as both the king’s son (typically Germanic) and the son of the king (typically French).

In any case, variety is not the same thing as the “complexity, ambiguity and doubt” Mr Heller fears. The situation is fairly simple. Mr Pinker argues that the accusative me in it’s me is in fact the default case, and can be used anywhere except as the subject of a tensed verb. In other words, in the absence of any reason to use the nominative, the accusative is natural:

Who ate the last piece of cake? Him.

What, me worry?

Me, I prefer skiing to surfing

“Me” in predicate position even appears in traditional places like the King James Bible’s “woe is me”. Where did the confusion come from, then? When grammarians first sat down to write the rules of English, they made certain mistakes that have had long-lasting consequences. Before the first grammars of English, the word “grammar” could only have meant the formal systems of Greek and Latin that they had learned. And so while few scholars announced their intention to press English into a classical mould, they were inevitably influenced by what seemed like the elegant rules of the classical languages. (It was tempting to assume Latin and Greek were superior languages. The first English grammarians never had to hear an inarticulate Roman teenager butcher his cases; they had only the works of great writers to judge by.)

As it happens, the rule “use the nominative case in the predicate nominative position” (It is I) is not just Greco-Latin. It is akin to the German (Das bin ich, which is the equivalent of what English speakers used to say: It am I, with both pronouns in the nominative case). English is descended from an old form of German, namely Anglo-Saxon. So It is I is not quite a foreign import. It is an alternative. The key is that there is nothing wrong with alternatives, which allow a writer or speaker to pick a level of formality. This is obviously the case for vocabulary (acquire is more formal than get, and therefore is smarter than so). But—though many people want there always to be only one right answer—it also applies to grammar. It is I is more formal than It is me in much the same way that it is is more formal than it’s.

Style variation is not only possible; it is desirable, allowing a speaker or writer to communicate not only content but meta-content—how the speaker or writer feels about the content and how it should be taken. We can be both logical and consistent without straitjacketing the language so tightly as to make its native speakers writhe in discomfort. If you think yourself articulate and care about English, yet can’t force yourself to speak as Mr Heller of the prestigious New Yorker would have you do, don’t worry. It’s not you. It’s him.