There's nothing wrong with "me"

We learnt about hypercorrection at varsity, and boy have I heard some funny examples since I left that hallowed café! I've probably been guilty of a few meself. According to Wikipedia, "Hypercorrection in linguistics is a usage of some rule of pronunciation or grammatical prescription that many users of a language consider incorrect, but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of these rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated."

I'm not sure if the following are true examples of hypercorrection, but I've always assumed that the speakers were operating on the "more is better" principle - with extra final dental plosives for good measure:

"It's a hard road to hoe." Hell yes - I reckon! Even if not tarmacadammed.

"Her midrift was adorned with a piercing!" Would you have minded, if her tummy weren't drifting so much? Or do you mean there was a rift 'twixt trousers and top?

This is all jolly good fun, and I'm not so rude that I jot these down when I hear them, so you'll have to make do with two eee gees, while I wrack my brains to remember some more for your reading pleasure... or - why don't you share some of your own in the comments yonder!

The real purpose of this posting, however, is to report from the front about my experience of the current use of the first person singular nominative, "I". In my view, "I" is pushing out "me" for all the wrong reasons. I accept language change. Every English speaker demonstrates language change with every sentence uttered or typed (do you really use that new-fangled spelling of "English"?). And I'm happy to accept hypercorrection as a bona fide cause of natural language change because we're social animals, not slavish rule-followers - but it seems so deeply ironic that people who are in other ways linguistically conservative have completely reversed a rule that until recently was traditional standard English.

There's definitely a trend I'm noticing, in which speakers and writers carefully avoid the first person accusative pronoun "me". "Please send the final version to John and I". Whaaaaat? "Between you and I, we will work it out." Pardon?

I find it so difficult not to snap (or type) "Me!" back - but I know I mustn't - Dale Carnegie would not approve, I'm sure. Now, the demographic of the offenders is (sorry gents; I do hope you don't recognise yourselves - drum roll please):

Gender: Male
Profession: MD
Nationality: English
Age: 50 +
Predisposition: conservative and pedantic

Would you believe this?

In attempting to understand this, I hereby theorise that as children a-growing, we have all been hectored not to say "Me and Jeremy are going down to the Hunts' for a swim". Come on - you can all hear your mother/father/aunty saying in reproving tones: "Jeremy and I" - can't you?? And I contend that as a result, many of us have chosen to hypercorrect ourselves: to use "me" is to venture into dangerous territory - much safer to do a find-and-replace with "I"!

But in fact it's not even that simple - maybe "I" isn't safe either, so let's use neither and say "My wife and myself are delighted to accept your invitation to swim at the Hunts'"!

What do you think? Just between we?