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.
21 July 2007
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1 comment:
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.
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