"[6] Writer and critic Henry Hitchings points to usage in William Congreve's The Double Dealer (1693) and in Mark Twain's letters.
He said Shakespeare probably "slipped accidentally": "My guess is that he was writing along rapidly, maybe at the end of the day when he was tired, was wishing he'd never come up with this Merchant of Venice idea, and eager to get over to the Mermaid Tavern for a beer with Jonson and Burbage".
[8] Kenneth G. Wilson, author of The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993), says hypercorrections are "the new mistakes we make in the effort to avoid old ones", and cites "between you and I" as an example—better, he says, to say "between the two of us".
Without expanding on the topic, Henry Hitchings considers the phrase a very specific, class-oriented kind of hypercorrection, which he calls "hyperurbanism", which "involves avoiding what is believed to be a 'low' mistake and using a supposedly classier word or pronunciation, although in fact the result is nothing of the sort".
[7] A similar reason is given by Bryan Garner (pace Chambers), who says "this grammatical error is committed almost exclusively by educated speakers trying a little too hard to sound refined but stumbling badly", and says the phrase is "appallingly common".
[23] Sociolinguist Gerard van Herk discusses "between you and I" and similar phrases with pronoun errors (which are all incorrect according to prescriptive linguists) in the context of social mobility.
[18] Writer Ben Yagoda, impressed by this argument, divides his thinking on the phrase's grammaticality in a pre-Pinker and a post-Pinker period,[17] and Peter Brodie, in a special issue of The English Journal devoted to grammar and usage, is likewise persuaded: "he also reminds us that these rules are generally dictated by snobbery and conceived as mere shibboleths".
He argues that the "error" is widespread (Elizabeth II even committing it), and that it should become acceptable usage: "The rule asks native speakers of English to stifle their instinctive way of expressing themselves".
Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English", while examples like "they've awarded he and his brother certificates of merit" and "... return the key to you or she" are classified as grammatically incorrect hypercorrection.