Sometimes I wonder whether popular bands shouldn’t hire grammar consultants for their lyrics. I was listening to the Black Crows the other day, and as “Hard to Handle,” the Isbell/Jones/Redding standard, played, I noticed a grammatical flaw made the protagonist accidentally bisexual:

Actions speak louder than words
And I’m a man of great experience
I know you’ve got another man
But I can love you better than him.

I’m sure the lyricist meant, “I can love you better than he,” which is an elliptical version of, “I can love you better than he can love you.” Choosing the objective “him” instead of the subjective “he” simply means he’s loving the guy. Adds a whole new meaning to the earlier line about being “a man of great experience.”

The Beatles also fell into this exact same trap: using the objective case pronoun when it should have been the subjective case. This time, though, the song inadvertently turns the two girls between which the narrator is dithering into bisexuals:

If I give my heart to you
I must be sure
From the very start
That you would love me more than her

I’m sure Freud would have loved these.