A short while ago I hinted elsewhere about my uncertainty with regard to the legitimacy of the grammatical rule about pronouns preceding gerunds. Thanks to Language Log, the situation for me has become a little more complicated.
For a start, it seems that the rule — if rule it be — is a little more all-encompassing than I realised. It's not just pronouns that must take the possessive; it's nouns, too. This is news to me. I've no idea where I first encountered the rule, but since that happy day I've been in no doubt that it was only pronouns that it applied to.
Historically, its use, it seems, has been mixed, with both the nominative and genitive making appearances before our verblike friends. This, I suspect, relates to the reason I'm so fond of that rule in the first place.
Quite simply, it's because it's a silly rule. [Or so I thought. Until after I posted this and read a comment to the above link and felt the need to come clean. But I'll leave the rest of my original spiel as is, to record my naïveté for posterity.]
To be sure, a lot of the rules of grammar are arbitrary. In fact, given the way in which language evolves, this is pretty much inevitable. If enough people use it, it's a rule. It doesn't matter how or why it came about; all that matters is that it did. The fact that we English speakers tend to put the subject at the beginning of a sentence and the verb in the middle has nothing to do with logic; it's just the way the language evolved. Equally, the fact that proper nouns are the only ones that are capitalised in English in no way suggests that the Germans are wrong when they give all nouns a capital.
Those rules, though, make sense. When dealing with a gerund, though, there are a few differences.
First of all, 'my going' and 'me going' make equal sense. Irrespective of which you use, one can make a case for it. More importantly, it's a little esoteric. What percentage of the population at large could verbalise the rule, do you think? A much lower percentage, I think, than those that could tell you all proper nouns should begin with a capital. There's probably a significant number of people who couldn't tell you what a gerund is. Of course, for those people there's no need to know. It just doesn't matter. It's entirely possible to write a great work of literature without ever hearing of the word.
And that's the reason I love the rule. Not so I can beat others over the head with it; they could use the dative for all I care. But I'll always opt for the possessive for pronouns, and pronouns only. Even now, when I learn that the 'rule' tells us to use it for nouns too, I'll happily say 'he objected to the car stopping where it did'. It's my rule. I don't care how official it is. It's a silly rule that serves no purpose, but one that does no harm. And that's the best type of rule to follow.
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