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21 July 2007

Pronoun Confusion on MSNBC's "Countdown"

Yesterday on MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann's guest host reported the termination of the marriage of a Hollywood couple. Referring to the wife, the guest host said:

She dissolved her marriage to he
. Once more, we have an otherwise articulate media person ignoring the virtue, if not the grammatical necessity of the object pronoun. She should have said: She dissolved her marriage to him, "him" serving as the indirect object of dissolve.

Later, in the broadcast, Mr. Olbermann, otherwise a media man who epitomizes good use of the language, also stepped into the pronoun trap when he said in a recorded promotion of a future broadcast:

It is Hillary Clinton and us instead of expressing correctly:

It is Hillary Clinton and we.

Here, Mr. Olbermann chose the object pronoun over the subject pronoun, the correct choice after a linking verb. Linking verbs of the "to be" variety: am, are, is, was, were... have the responsibility of putting together words of equal grammatical rank. Thus, if Senator Clinton is a subject, and a pronoun is linked back to her, that pronoun must be put in the subjective case. "Case" indicates how nouns or pronouns function: subject, object (of some variety), possessor.



1 comment:

dadlak said...

Thanks for the grammar stories and tips. I'm sure you've read the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", which also lampoons modern grammatical errors.