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I, personally, always use "myself":

  • A person such as myself.

But are the other three correct and if they are then are they Br.E or Am.E?

  • A person such as I am.
  • A person such as I.
  • A person such as me.

With he, she, it, we, they, you is it all the same?

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    In themselves all of them are correct and it's not about language variant or dialect. But the one you can or should use depends on the context. This is a topic not 100% clear to me either so I hope someone gives an answer where they put each in a proper context.
    – Korvin
    Commented Mar 24, 2017 at 8:19
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    "A person like me" is how you would often hear it spoken in AmE.
    – TimR
    Commented Mar 26, 2017 at 10:08

2 Answers 2

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To be grammatically correct, "It could never happen to a person such as I." You have the correct test in the first of the three sentences: test it by adding the verb "am" at the end of the sentence. In conversation (and even in writing), you will often hear "me".

You could never say, "It could never happen to a person such as me am." "me" is an object pronoun ("Give the book to me."); "I" is a subject pronoun ("I want the book."). The same rule applies with the other subject pronouns you listed.

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  • That would imply that "A person such as myself am" would be correct, which it is not. "A person such as me" is grammatically correct (though discouraged).
    – paddotk
    Commented Jun 10, 2017 at 18:05
  • How would it, poepje? Don't you think such as myself am would fail PAL-W's am test, just like me am*? Commented Sep 19, 2017 at 15:44
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It depends on the sentence. Consider this one (submitted by a student of mine):

Thomas had been perfectly willing to look the other way while men such as I lived our lives the way we wanted.

In this example, I lean towards the objective case. Does “such as” act as a linking verb? I don’t think so. It’s a preposition, no? (Sometimes.) Shouldn’t what follows be the object of the preposition? Another way to think about it: If you put “like” in place of “such as,” would you say “I” or “me”? I’d say “me,” in the same way that you'd say "while men under me raised their eyes." So I advised the student to replace "I" with "me." (He probably won't. He's very stylistic.)

For other discussion on the question, see the somewhat grumpy answers by Colin elsewhere on this site.

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