Object pronoun: me and John, or John and me? [closed]

Solution 1:

When writing formal emails to clients, and I am asking them to contact us if they have any issues, I use either "me or John" OR "John or me".

How I personally differentiate between the two is by putting the preferred contact's name first. If I'd prefer the client to contact John, I would put his name first. As both are grammatically correct (per the above responses) I have no preference other than that!

As for "John AND me"... I would probably write it this way just for the formal looking nature of it (damn you "John and I"!) - but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it either way.

Solution 2:

As Peter Shor and John Lawler have mentioned in the comments, grammatically either order is correct. However, English-speaking children are taught to put the pronoun referring to themselves last (the reason given being that it is more polite to put others before yourself), so I would agree with skaaptjop that "__ and me" is the safest way of saying this (this of course only applies to the object position; for the subject "__ and I" would be used instead).

Despite this rule of etiquette, it's not surprising to hear people using phrases like "me and you" or "me and my friend".