Is it ok to say "The boss is me!!" (=I am the boss

happeningthang · Post by **happeningthang** » Mon Nov 10, 2003 6:33 am

Hey all,

Just throwing in my two cents.

Look, while it's true that english is a pliable language, and you will be understood in your assertion, "the boss is me", strictly speaking it is INCORRECT.

I am not a linguist or anything, but just being a native speaker I would always recognise, "The Boss is me", as being a garbled statement, and one that would identify the speaker as being a non-native speaker of English.

Theories will always allow for a discrepency that reality doesn't afford. I think this is one example.

(It's only two cents, not worth much)

cheers

szwagier · Post by **szwagier** » Sat Nov 15, 2003 11:50 am

I have a friend from SE England who says "You was" when talking to one person and "you were" when talking to more than one. He's a native speaker of English, so it's neither an error nor a mistake - it's just part of his dialect. I know a lot of native speakers of English who would consider the utterance "He's went to work" to be ungrammatical, but in the part of Scotland where I grew up it was perfectly normal.

The point is that we really shouldn't trust our intuitions, based as they are purely on our own experience of the language. The most we can say is "I haven't heard it", but given the amount of English that's being used around the world at any given moment it's not particularly helpful...

I've just popped over to the Cobuild Online corpus and fed in the search

NOUN+is+me

and came up with examples like "the problem is me" (as in "the problem is me, not her") and "that replacement is me" (as in "they've sent a replacement, and that replacement is me"). So while the specific string "the boss is me" doesn't appear, there's nothing inherently wrong with the structure "the X is me".

Hope that's of some use

dduck · Post by **dduck** » Sat Nov 15, 2003 1:21 pm

I'm intrigued to know which part of Scotland your example comes from; as you suggest "I've never heard it before", but as a Scot I'm surprised.

Having avoided this area for some time, I think "The boss is me" is syntatically correct, it's probably even semantically valid. The only thing that occurs to me is that stylistically is poor.
Iain

szwagier · Post by **szwagier** » Sat Nov 15, 2003 1:45 pm

dduck wrote:I'm intrigued to know which part of Scotland your example comes from; as you suggest "I've never heard it before", but as a Scot I'm surprised.

Having avoided this area for some time, I think "The boss is me" is syntatically correct, it's probably even semantically valid. The only thing that occurs to me is that stylistically is poor.
Iain

East Side, and then South Side, of Edinburgh.

"Stylistically poor", I'm happy to agree with! Same with "you was" and "he's went" - they are emphatically not something I would feel comfortable in accepting from EFL learners, although I would be less sure about ESL learners living/studying in the regions mentioned...

LarryLatham · Post by **LarryLatham** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 2:24 am

The point is that we really shouldn't trust our intuitions, based as they are purely on our own experience of the language. The most we can say is "I haven't heard it", but given the amount of English that's being used around the world at any given moment it's not particularly helpful...

Oh, I soooo agree with this. It is quite risky even for middle-aged people (or even older) who have been around English for what they consider to be a long time to assert that since they haven't heard something before, it must be incorrect (or even odd) English. Native speakers in different parts of the world, or, as we've just seen from szwagier, different parts of the city, speak different varieties of English. For us (as teachers) to suggest that there is only one "correct" variety seems to me more than slightly overbearing.

Larry Latham

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 8:39 am

Dear Ian,
way out for the accusative and dative. Him is the accusative and dative form of the nominative he, but after "I am ..." you will always have the nominative case, as you are dealing with a complement, not a direct or indeirect object. Think of Spanish "soy yo".

Now the fact that we say "it's me" and not "it's I" as the false purists would suggest (why they never go the whole hog and insist on "I am I" I don't know) is that we are using "me" as the emphatic form, as in the French "C'est moi".

dduck · Post by **dduck** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 9:45 am

Stephen Jones wrote:Dear Ian,
way out for the accusative and dative. Him is the accusative and dative form of the nominative he, but after "I am ..." you will always have the nominative case, as you are dealing with a complement, not a direct or indeirect object. Think of Spanish "soy yo".

I'm glad you pointed out my mistake. I'd studied German grammar for a while - for some reason I thought the nominative and accusative pronoun forms were the same (some are, some aren't) and I'd transfered this schema over to English. But after checking I see that I mixed things up (I need to check how Dutch does it again). As you've explained it, it does make better sense. Thanks.

In German, they say "Ich bin's" = "I am it".

Iain

coffeedecafe · Post by **coffeedecafe** » Thu Sep 30, 2004 4:45 am

any assumption that poor grammar is a sign of a non native speaker cannot be supported. as a question on a test, the 'boss is me' will lower the students score. in real life, the boss is a native speaker more often than not.
and not all bosses are known to be bright. however, if the boss says, "the boss is me." ; he has every right to say so because he da boss man. to correct the grammar of an anonymous test page carries no penalty. correcting the grammar of a supervisor who may have reverted to his grade school english level in a time of frustration will not get you a raise in pay, i am thinking. but the boss is not i.

Attila · Post by **Attila** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:44 pm

szwagier wrote:I have a friend from SE England who says "You was" when talking to one person and "you were" when talking to more than one. He's a native speaker of English, so it's neither an error nor a mistake - it's just part of his dialect.

As a native of SE England, I would still label it a mistake. It is a common but slightly childish form, and should certainly be avoided by anyone over 30.
To use an extreme example, it is also common in SE England to tag 'innit' after every sentence, as in "I'm going to see my mum, innit", and no matter how frequently it is used it is still very poor English - because the intended message is not communicated.
Instead of hearing the sentence and thinking "He's going to see his mum", the listener will think "What a plank! I think I'll smash his face in."

coffeedecafe · Post by **coffeedecafe** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 6:56 am

now, if i heard a person say "what a plank" my first thought would be that maybe he meant "walk the plank" like in sea stories. but when the offer to rearrange the face is included- now i have context! obviously the speaker is stating that ideas do not penetrate this person any better than a board. both 'what a plank', and' the boss is me' would fit quite naturally in your basic detective novels staged on the dim side of the tracks. even my mispelling of 'dah boss-man isme' would fit. but the boss is me and you was will never be considered standard classroom english for either the english or american, i am thinking. but much of our understanding does come from context.

Attila · Post by **Attila** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 2:06 pm

coffeedecafe wrote:now, if i heard a person say "what a plank" my first thought would be that maybe he meant "walk the plank" like in sea stories.

Hence the exclamation mark, which you missed. An exclamation in the form of "What a (singular noun)!" has little ambiguity, even if I insert the over-polite plank in place of the usual word, which rhymes with front.

The example was to illustrate that not all frequently-used expressions by native speakers can be sanctified by usage.

coffeedecafe · Post by **coffeedecafe** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 11:25 am

yes, punctuation does aid understanding. in fact[ !!!], by themselves would provide some meaning. but context is a wonderful thing, involving both the verbal context and the mental context of the person listening. at a recent dinner i heard about two words of a conversation about the language of mandarin. having recently surfed some of these pages, my mind offered the option of 'mentoring' which only was shown to be a mistake as time progressed. for instance if we spent too much time on the fact the the boss is me is slightly less acceptable though still understandable we might miss the possible context of the actor on stage arriving back at his office to some disaster or other, and receiving the question of who is responsible here? at this point he says, unfortunately...[turning with dramatic pause for the audience to notice his facial emotion].. the boss. is..I...

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