That’s correct, by the way. You’re supposed to use the nominative case (I rather than me) when you have a predicate nominative, which is what this happens to be. That’s why when you knock on the door and some gruff voice demands to know who is there, you should properly reply, “It is I.” The person next to you, if asked the same question, should reply, “Yes, it is she.”
These are correct things but are they necessarily good things to write? When something is jarring in its use, you go beyond communicating your message to communicating a subtext. In the case with “Woe is I,” I may be communicating the fact that I am a smart-aleck as much as the fact that I am a bit chagrined when grammar collides with proper communication.
I can tell you why these particular things are so unpopular. English, unlike many foreign languages, does not have a bunch of declensions, in other words, you don’t necessarily modify the word if it is in the nominative versus the dative or accusative case (and so on and so on). Languages that modify words for the case or other factors can seem complex and even troublesome to English speakers, but they have a big payoff. Declensions give you the right to mess up word order. Many such languages have incredible freedom in terms of what word goes where in a sentence because they can tell by how it’s modified what it does.
These freedom in word order is a topic for another day. Woe is I, English lacks this to a significant degree.
For instance take the sentence: the germ gave the boy tuberculosis. That works fine the way it is. But if you spoke one of those case-happy languages like German you could say: the boy gave tuberculosis the germ, I mean in that order, and the meaning would be the same as the original.
English is therefore a bit more fettered with word order. We need the subject to be first and the direct object to come at the end and the indirect object (dative case) to be in the middle or add a “to” to help us along. That’s why we can only say, “The germ gave the boy tuberculosis” and never Tuberculosis gave the germ the boy. The advantages of the latter are that in many languages certain sentence positions carry more weight and inflection. In German, the first and last thing you say in a sentence are emphasized. A clever writer can mix sentences up to get that subtle added layer of meaning.
Which brings us back to woe. In English, subjects go first. When it comes to the first person pronoun, singular, you see I in this slot. You don’t see “me” there too often unless somebody is trying to be clever or unusual or is, in fact, dimwitted. I is nominative case and it belongs at the first position in a sentence.
If you need first person singular again in the sentence, following the first position and the second position (typically but not always the verb), you almost always use “me.” Me is the accusative and dative case of I. Think of normal sentences: He saw me; she told me; what is going to become of me? For that reason, English speakers just naturally like to use I first and me later on.
Most other things (except possibly questions like “Where am I?”) tend to want “me” to come in any other position of the sentence. So “Woe is I,” although correct, has a clunker quality to the English ear. So does, “It is he!” although it is also quite correct.
So what do you do? Well that depends on whether you are writing to please a fuddy-duddy English teacher or to communicate your actual thoughts. If you were in a grammar contest or possibly addressing HRH Elizabeth II or you were writing an essay to win some kind of Nobel Prize of Proper American Usage, you should probably go with correctness. The subtext of those situations just screams grammar.
But if you’re writing to make people understand you, say, “Woe is me.” “Who’s that?” “Hey, it’s me!” That has a more natural, authentic pitch to it.
Sometimes writing is about proper pitch, not proper grammar.
