Friday, September 21, 2018

adjectives - "Despicable Me": can "me" be used in such a way?



We know a movie named Despicable Me. I guess it means "I am despicable". But can me be used in such a way?


For example, can I further say unavoidable me to mean "I am unavoidable"? Are there other examples? Or can I just do this with any adjective?



Answer



Considering this issue strictly in terms of grammar, there are two things to consider here.


First, in the phrase "despicable me", "me" is a noun (a pronoun, actually, but still a noun) and "despicable" is an adjective. So in one sense, yes, it is perfectly grammatically appropriate to place adjectives before nouns ("red firetruck") and by extension it works to place "despicable" before "me".


Second, the sentence as a whole is a fragment. There is no noun performing a verb; there is simply a lone adjective-noun pair, which technically is not enough to form a full, proper English sentence. However, it could be considered an exclamatory sentence, especially in context, so we let it slide.


In short, it is a proper adjective-noun phrase, and we'll look the other way on the whole fragment thing, so yes, it can be used in such a way.


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