is /me/." "As such expressions," he says, "are still denounced by the grammars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in writing. The result of this reaction is that the /me/ in such constructions as 'between John and /me/' and 'he saw John and /me/' sounds vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into /I/." Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still more. Following /than/ and /as/ the American uses the objective form of the pronoun, as in "he is taller than /me/" and "such as /her/." [Pg224] He also uses it following /like/, but not when, as often happens, he uses the word in place of /as/ or /as if/. Thus he says "do it like /him/," but "do it like /he/ does" and "she looks like /she/ was sick." What appears here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun only, are not adverbs, but prepositions, and that they should have the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other prepositions have. Just as "the taller of /we/" would sound absurd to all of us, so "taller than /he/," to the unschooled American, sounds absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. "As /her/" was used by Swift, "than /me/" by Burke, and "than /whom/" by Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, "than /him/," is grammatically correct and logically necessary.[69] For example, compare "I love you more than /him/" and "I love you more than /he/." The first means "I love you more than (I love) /him/"; the second, "I love you more than /he/ (loves you)." In the first /him/ does not refer to /I/, which is nominative, but to /you/, which is objective, and so it is properly objective also. But the American, of course, uses /him/ even when the preceding noun is in the nominative, save only when another verb follows the pronoun. Thus, he says, "I love you better than /him/," but "I love you better than /he/ does."