Naturalness of expressions like "Me and Adam have discovered ....." in conversational English [duplicate]

I heard an American radio personality, university graduate, was saying below.

"Me and Adam have discovered a lot of weird things since we came to Japan."

My question here is not about grammatical things like the difference between I and Me, but the naturalness of the expression itself. I have this question because the example above is actually not the only case. I have noticed the radio personality uses the same wording often, but the conversations between him and his radio program partner, Adam, always keep going just smoothly as if no weird wording were used. FYI, Adam is a Canadian, and he is also university graduate.

How natural does that sound to you? Can we use that in some formal settings too?

Using "me" (or indeed other object pronouns) like this generally considered to be grammatically incorrect, because a subject pronoun ("I") should be used as subject of the verb.

In formal (and probably everyday middle-of-the-road) language, this misuse of object pronouns is to be avoided. You should use "Adam and I", with "I" after the "and", because "I and Adam" sounds awkward (and grandiose).

But "me" as a subject is relatively common in informal language. Certainly I remember using sentences like "Me and Simon are going to the park" in the school playground, only to be rebuked by my teachers in the classroom.

In the classroom we learn to say "Simon and I are going to the park" instead, using a subject pronoun, because Simon and I are the subjects of the verb to go.

If we have good teachers, we learn to check by removing the other person: "Simon and I are going..." becomes "I am going", which sounds ok, so we say it. This way, when the pronoun should correctly be an object pronoun, we get it right even when Simon is in the way: "The dog attacked me" so "The dog attacked Simon and me". And we don't have to learn nasty words like accusative.

If we didn't pay enough attention though, or had bad teachers, we'll think the rule is that you never say "Simon and me" and always "Simon and I". So we start producing hyper-correct forms like "The dog attacked Simon and I", where "I" is a subject pronoun instead of the required object pronoun ("me"). Or "Mr Smith give Simon and I the belt for bad grammar" (should be "Simon and me"). And people who learnt this and in later life find some authority while avoiding dates with descriptivist grammarians might start hyper-correcting people who otherwise use their pronouns correctly (effectively? pragmatically?).

This all gets scary pretty fast, and so we might instead fudge things by using "myself" etc., which is also wrong, but less likely to draw ire: "Myself and Simon are going drinking in the park", or "the dog attacked Simon and myself". Forms like these are common in colloquial speech in Glasgow, where I live, and not a million miles from the entirely correct "I myself am going drinking", with "myself" as an emphatic pronoun.

But we can also take revenge on these ill-informed hyper-correct pedants and, to spite our expensive university educations, start dropping forms like "Me and Adam have discovered a lot of weird things since we came to Japan" into our radio conversations. It's more fun than explaining to somebody that French has disjunctive pronouns and 1066 and all that so why can't English because "Simon et moi allons au parc ce soir" is ok? It's more rootsy than opining that English speakers must have a pretty weak grip on grammatical case these days if Simon and Adam's getting in the way is enough to muck it up....

Maybe what we're really learning is that our American radio personality's gig researching weirdness in Japan is enough of an indicator of social prestige that he doesn't need the crutch of prescriptive grammar to get ahead, except of course when it came to writing the application to get the job in the first place. If they is a reasonably sophisticated user of language, perhaps with a penchant for swiping pragmatist linguists right, s/he can likely adapt xir pronouns to the situation, (un)consciously confident that good language is really all about communicative power... Or maybe instead we'll one day hear a radio programme regretfully imploring the grandchildren to invest in Grammarly after a later-life realisation that pronominal correction is a socio-political power play and hell, the history of English from the Anglo-Saxon swamp til now tells us that it's always more fun to wield power by proxy than receive hit like me, Adam and hyper-correct I did.

Such digressions aside, I'm struggling slightly to think of a situation where saying "Me and Adam" instead of "Adam and I" without a change in word order or stress changes the meaning EXCEPT in terms of social signalling -- something I gather Japanese knows about. Maybe something like "Sally saw Steven and I went home and had breakfast", versus "Sally saw Steven and me went home and had breakfast". But even here, putting a comma or pause in makes more of a difference: in "Sally saw Steven and I, went home and had breakfast", Sally gets the food, whereas in "Sally saw Steven, and me went home and had breakfast" the breakfast is likely me's comfort food.

To summarise: in informal language it's quite frequent, potentially common, potentially natural, and doesn't really affect meaning. But please don't say "Adam and me would be excellent choices for the post of Pronoun Safety Officer" in formal communication that matters.

I think the reason this causes confusion is that children are often corrected without explaining why.

For example: a child says “Me and Pete are going to play a game.”  This is wrong, so they they're told to say ‘Pete and I’ instead of ‘Me and Pete’.  However, the child hears that ‘Me and Pete’ is always wrong, and then either overcorrects to “The teacher asked to see Pete and I after class.” — which is equally wrong — or realises that ‘Pete and me’ is correct in that case and so disregards the original instruction completely.  Or, more likely, just gets confused.

The real point, which doesn't get explained, is of course that I/me inflects even when it's in a compound.

So: “I think that…” → “Pete and I think that…”

But: “He hit me.” → “He hit Pete and me.”

I think what makes this unintuitive is the separation between pronoun and verb in some of these cases.  If you put the other person first, then you clearly get “Pete and I think…”, because “…me think…” would sound wrong.  But while “…hit I” would sound equally wrong, “hit Pete and I” doesn't trigger the same reaction due to the intervening words.  (Similarly, if you put yourself first, then intervening words make the “Me and Pete went…” sound less obviously wrong than “Me went…” would.)  I suspect that's why people who put themselves first tend to get the subject case wrong, while people who put themselves last tend to get the object case wrong.

Obviously this is part of a broader discussion about register, dialect, and when formal correctness is desirable.  (As a self-confessed pedant, I think correctness is always desirable, of course!  Not just for consistency and simplicity, but also because it reduces ambiguity.)  However, I think it's useful to understand the principles and why people don't pick them up easily.

'Correct', and 'wrong' are words used to describe speech taught by language teachers and by newspaper copy editors, but they are not very useful for describing how people actually speak and write.

Native English speakers and non-native alike are taught things like "Use the nominative 'I' in subject position (and at the end if in a conjunction)." in order to give the formal

Adam and I are...

The latter is what is called the 'standard' way of saying it. However, when speaking informally, the pattern to follow is:

Me and Adam are...

The latter is perfectly grammatical for a less than formal register. Some might call it 'bad English' or 'nonstandard' but it is exactly the thing to say in informal circumstances.

Of course if you are learning English or writing or in most circumstances you should favor the standard version because it sounds more educated and acceptable. But educated and acceptable are not the same thing as correct.

To be clear, no one says

Me is...

or

and I Adam

Those are definitely never said and is ungrammatical in all varieties of English (that I am aware of). The first one seems inconsistent with "Me and Adam are..." but language isn't always strictly logical or with only simple rules. The second one is just absurd (for English, but might work in some other language).

So if you want to sound informal, the way to say it is "Me and Adam" (OK sometimes people say "Adam and me". I doubt anybody would ever say "I and Adam" but I'm not sure).

If you feel like you must use 'correct' and 'wrong' then you should probably say something like "X is correct for the formal register". But better would be "X is the pattern that is (almost always) used" (in the default register or variety being talked about).

When speaking, we sometimes say things that aren't grammatically correct, such as the example you shared above. However, in writing, we (at least, those who care about grammar) tend to sound as grammatically correct as possible. So, no, "Me and Adam" in that instance is definitely inaccurate, therefore it sounds unnatural. If you omit "and Adam" from the sentence, then it would be "Me have discovered..." So, if you can, try to think before you speak, and learn from this radio personality. =)