We object to this subject

I discovered a great way to have people look at you like you're a madman: expound enthusiastically about grammar in the middle of a tutorial about psychiatry.

It really was relevant though. We were discussing a thing called a Mental State Examination used to assess a patient's state of mind. There are a bunch of different things to assess, and some tests are labelled "subjective" and some are labelled "objective".

My tute group got into a discussion about how some of the so-called "objective" measures really weren't objective at all - they were just the doctor's opinion, and so were actually subjective. I could see where they were coming from, since science usually uses the word "objective" to mean independent of the observer, so the measurement would be quantifiable and repeatable. In contrast, having a doctor write on a form that he thinks the patient is dressed like a scruffy bum seems much more subjective than objective.

At this stage, I interjected, explaining that it seemed to me that the labels "subjective" and "objective" were being used in their grammatical sense. So a subjective measure was something that the patient tells you about themselves (so the patient "does it"), and an objective measure is one that the doctor assesses (so the patient is having it "done to them"), just like the subject and object of a sentence.

I was about to enthusiastically begin illustrating the difference using the example of who vs whom when I realized that the room was very quiet and everyone else had leaned back from the table with raised eyebrows. They all clearly thought I was a lunatic, so stopped talking. The discussion moved on to another topic in that "So, how 'bout them Broncos?" way that happens when someone has just said something very awkward or bizarre.

Honestly, what do they teach them at schools these days?