Pronouns cause problems. I, you, he, she, it, we and they are personal pronouns. Five of these are among the few words in English that take different cases according to whether they are the subject or the object of a verb. If they are the object or are governed by a preposition, they take the accusative case: me, him, her, us and them.

(You and it are both nominative and accusative.) Getting cases right ought to be straightforward, but many writers go astray. Deborah Hargreaves of The Guardian recently wrote about Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension: “He has already taken a £2.7 million lump sum out of his sizeable retirement pot — rather a lot to you and I.”

It should be “rather a lot to you and me”. The pronouns are governed by the preposition “to”. They must therefore be in the accusative case. Perhaps because phrases such as “my brother and me” are drilled out of us in childhood, we have a residual belief that the nominative case is somehow better English than the accusative. It isn’t. The right case depends on the pronoun’s role in the sentence, and nothing else.

Another Guardian writer, Dave Hill, was similarly muddled when he wrote about the 2012 Olympic stadium: “I thought I’d treat you instead to the London vista available to we who gaze upon the evolving Olympic scene from the Greenway.”

Make it “to us who gaze”. The case of the pronoun depends on its role in the main clause of the sentence.

Here, the pronoun is again governed by the preposition “to”, so it must be in the accusative case.

For a deliciously incompetent mistake in the opposite direction, consider Lynn Barber, in a catty review for The Daily Telegraph of a book by Clive James. Barber writes: “Predictably, [James] claims to be a stickler for correct English . . . before, blow me, describing Robert Hughes as ‘a bit older than I’.”

Barber nicely makes a fool of herself, because James’s usage is correct. The phrase “a bit older than I” is a comparison, in which “than” operates as a conjunction. The pronoun after the conjunction takes the same case as the first term of the comparison, namely Robert Hughes.

The Pedant’s general rules for the case of pronouns are: work out what function the pronoun has in the sentence;and don’t imagine that Clive James is illiterate.

thepedant@thetimes.co.uk

Times recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• How to get Coleen Rooney's post-baby body
• The A-Z of winter style rules