I recently read a book where the phrase "with X and I" was used over and over again. I guess I am just a Grammar General about this, but it annoyed me to no end. I kept thinking, where it the copy editor here? (Because I know that lots of authors make grammar mistakes and that is no big deal to me). But then I wondered if the author had stetted the copy editor's corrections, and then it would be the author's mistake. Not only a mistake of ignorance, but of arrogance.

To be technical, this is a hyper correction mistake, where someone is trying to sound correct by putting "I" instead of "me" in every position, even when it should be "me" because it is the object of the preposition "with."

And then I tell myself to calm down. I am truly more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar and often enjoy listening to the "bad grammar" of people around me because it is interesting to hear the differences of what works in a particular setting, but not in another.

Also, it is not as if I make no grammar mistakes. I just don't make that particular one, unless I let a character make it on purpose. But it was a good lesson, nonetheless. What it taught me was that sometimes a reader can get kicked out of the enjoyment of a story based on some trivial thing that really shouldn't matter. And some of those readers are critics who then rip a book because they didn't enjoy it, when 99% of the population would.