Please excuse my/me being late!

Should you say Please excuse my being late or Please excuse me being late?

To come to grips with this simple question I’m afraid I need to get a little technical and start using very old-school terms such as gerund and gerundive and gerund phrase. Please excuse my being schoolmarmish.

 The use of the gerund  and the gerundive faded from Classical Latin to Late Latin, but, when it did mean something, the distinction was that the gerund was a verbal noun and the gerundive was a verbal adjective, with the sense of obligation or necessity.  The standard translation always went ‘requiring to be …’.  QED stands for Quod erat demonstrandum which translates as ‘That which is requiring to be demonstrated.’   Demonstrandum is a gerundive.

 In the general efforts of the post-English Renaissance grammarians to force Latin grammatical structures onto English, the gerund and gerundive received some attention.  The gerund in English is the noun formed from the present participle of the verb.  So the verb to read  has a present participle reading which can become the gerund in the sentence: I like reading. It can also operate as an adjective: the reading list.

 The gerundive with its sense of obligation doesn’t really exist in English. The best equivalent form is to be … as in The books to be read are on the desk. So in English we have the gerund or gerund phrase which is always meant to be the subject or the object of the verb.

 In the sentence Please excuse my being late!  the object of the verb excuse is the verbal noun being late.    The gerund phrase. If we changed that to Please excuse me being late!  the object of the verb excuse is now me and to me is loosely attached the adjectival construction being late. 

The grammarians would argue that it is not me that has to be excused but the being late and that the gerund phrase should be the object of the verb. Being the noun object it takes the possessive my to indicate who owns the being late. The gerund phrase with the adjectival possessive form of the pronoun is correct.  

 Unfortunately in English there is a strong pull on the pronoun to be the object of the verb and for the pronoun then to have phrases attached to it.  So our English intuitions incline us strongly to the sentence Please excuse me being late.  Thus you have the classic situation in which one thing is taught in the classroom and quite another is said in the playground.