Hot answers tagged object
77
Short answer: When in doubt, use who. It's disconcerting to hear whom where who is expected, but the usage of who in situations where previously whom was standard has been increasing, especially in spoken usage.
Longer answer: The traditional rule is that whom was to be used in the "objective case". What this means in practice (it's even controversial ...
26
This is an example of hypercorrection, which is when native speakers make an accidental error in their zeal to avoid a different error.
In this case, the error that's being avoided is the error of writing "you and me" in subject position, as in the following sentence:
You and me are going to the store.
This is formally incorrect, although it's very ...
18
"It is ME" is not grammatically correct in the academic sense, but is used in spoken English.
"It is I" is grammatically correct in the pure sense, but would never be used in spoken English - or very rarely by people who speak in an ultra-formal dialect.
"It is I" would have been correct in Shakespeare's time, in spoken English, but not now.
18
You're right that it depends on the rest of the phrase (subject or object):
"My wife and I are eating an apple" is correct because "my wife and I" is the subject of the sentence. You could replace "my wife and I" with "we".
"You can see my wife and me in this picture" is correct because "my wife and me" is the object of the sentence. You could replace "my ...
15
"Whom remains in significant use following a preposition" but use in objective case is moribund. The Wikipedia article on "who" has a detailed explanation.
The death of "whom" has been tracked on Language Log over the years. For example, here and here.
More examples:
"It's a made-up word used to trick students."
"As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word ...
12
The rules you were taught are artificial. It is very rare to hear "as I" used in the way you have it in your examples out in the wild. It may be correct according to prescriptive English grammar, but it is not idiomatic to the language until you add the extra bits. One would say either:
She is smarter than me.
or
She is smarter than I am.
The ...
11
Whom would be wrong in your example; it should be who. The reason is that a relative pronoun functions as part of the relative clause, not of the main clause. Don't let the question mark fool you: who is a relative pronoun here, not an interrogative one.
Are you comfortable with [the person]
who he is?
This shows the structure of your sentence a ...
8
"You and I" is the subject. "You and me" is the object.
"You and I hate Phil." "Phil hates you and me." "Phil is hated by you and me." All of these are grammatically correct. (No offence to Phil.)
It really winds me up when people hypercorrect because they think that "you and me" is always wrong. "Phil hates you and I." NO! This is worrying.
The ...
8
There's no special "watchdog" likely to come knocking on the door in the middle of the night if you use it, but it's relatively uncommon (witness that thin blue line at the bottom of the chart)...
On the other hand, there're over 400,000 instances, and it is more common than it was...
In short, there're doesn't have anything like the "accepted status" ...
7
In this example, it should definitely be who.
A single word question like that is typically seen, grammatically, as an ellipsis for a full-sentence version, as you say. But elided words/phrases are almost always things which have already just been said, so following “He ate the entire cake,” the natural ellipsis would be “Who [ate the entire cake]?”, not ...
7
They are synonymous but grammatically different. They are often used interchangeably (incorrectly) by native speakers. There is a simple way to tell which one to use, by imagining the clause without the "you and" part:
Example: You and (I/me?) should spend more time together
Imagine: "Me should..." (this is clearly wrong)
Imagine: "I should..." (correct!)
...
7
The OED says "A hooded sweatshirt, fleece, or other garment.", and therein lies the answer, I think.
A hoodie is a "hooded sweatshirt" or "hooded fleece", (in contradistinction to the original kind of each, which had no hood) and the abbreviation is natural.
As far as I know "hooded coat" or "hooded raincoat" have never become established phrases, and so ...
7
"I like in the rain" is ungrammatical. I native speaker will understand it to mean that the writer or speaker is not a native speaker of English.
I would probably assume that the verb being or walking or singing has been omitted.
Another possibility is that a native speaker will ask whether In the Rain is the name of a new song or movie or book. In that ...
6
Generally, the rule used in English for pronouns is that you always use the objective form of a pronoun, unless the pronoun is the subject of a verb. If it’s the subject of a verb, then you use the subjective form (I, you, he, she, it, we, they). In all other cases—as the object of a verb, as the object of a preposition, or non-sententially—use the objective ...
6
To add to the previous examples by kdt.
The pronoun "I" is in the subjective case whereas the pronoun "Me" is in the objective case.
So when you want to tell that you did some action then use "I"
e.g. My mother and I went to the market.
If some action is received by you then make the use of "Me".
e.g. Vijay offered some chocolates to you and me.
6
As reported from the NOAD:
me /mi/
pronoun [first person singular]
1. used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself as the object of a verb or preposition: do you understand me? | wait for me!
• used after the verb to be and after than or as: hi, it's me | you have more than me.
• informal to or for myself: I've got me a job.
It's then ...
6
Paring it down to the minimum, it's "sandwich", because "her", "cold", and "chicken" are all being used as adjectives. And "for lunch" is a prepositional phrase also being used as an adjective modifying "sandwich". In this phrase, "lunch" is the object of the preposition; it is not the object of the sentence.
6
The construction of that fragment is a little convoluted, so let's break it down:
(You) go before {people sex one another}.
The subject "you" is implied, as is normal with the imperative. I've indicated this with parentheses. The word before is a conjunction, and it introduces the clause people sex one another, which is in curly braces.
The clause people ...
6
It's not incorrect, but it's difficult to say /'ðɛrər/, with two /r/s in a row, so mostly nobody does. The purpose of a contraction is to make things easier to say, not harder.
This difficulty is one of the forces that has led to widespread use and acceptance of there's as an unchanging existential idiom, like Es gibt in German, Hay in Spanish, Il y a in ...
6
The choice is not between him and me and he and I, but between him and me and his and my. But in any case, this sounds like a fabricated sentence unlikely to occur in the normal speech of native speakers. Apart from anything else, there's something wrong with the syntax. It looks as if you want the simple occurrence to be the subject of the sentence. If so, ...
5
Some languages have less noun/pronoun inflection than English (Chinese languages, for example), and some languages have more inflection (Latin, for example). The answer to your "why" question is that this is simply how the English language developed. You can trace similarities between English and other Germanic languages, and you can look at the history of ...
5
Like Myqlarson said, SVO merely indicates a language typology, which basic elements order in a sentence is Subject-Verb-Object. This means that these elements are typically in this position, but in the middle you might put other elements (adjectives, adverbs); there might also exist exceptions in the same language to this rule.
In your case "I'm Tom", we ...
5
Yes, the last it is necessary for the sentence to make grammatical sense.
Receive, when applied to specific objects (like the box), is transitive, so it needs an object to be acted upon. You receive the box; "the box" is nicknamed it (for the purposes of this sentence; this is called anaphora), hence you receive it.
That said, it sounds much better to me ...
4
To begin with, one and another are bad at English:
He was bad at English.
I was bad at English.
Using "almost as___as" to compare your proficiency, in full, one writes:
He was almost as bad at English as I [was].
The construction,
He was almost as bad at English as me,
though more familiar to the ears, is wrong, as me (object ...
4
Evolved English: He was almost as bad at English as me.
Queen's English: He was almost as bad at English as I.
Redundant English: He was almost as bad at English as I was (or used to be).
That last one is equal to saying "Either he'll come tomorrow, or he won't come tomorrow."
4
An alternative view is that "you and me" was always OK until somebody decided in the 18th century that English should be like Latin and started teaching that you have to use 'I' when you would use 'ego' in Latin.
Since the rule taught since then is hard for English speakers to grasp (since grammatical case is marginal in English), many people are unsure of ...
4
In this sentence, to cross the road is an objective predicative complement within the sentence.
Such phrases take the general form:
SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT + COMPLEMENT
The object here is clearly him.
Side note
As far as I'm aware, the "objective complement" is a rather peculiar construct to the English language. Other European languages (I can vouch ...
4
Who is correct. In reality, whom is largely obsolete, and shouldn't be used in isolation.
See this question for a general discussion of who/whom: Using "who" and "whom". As shown there, it's rarely actually necessary to use whom, and in the case of a one-word answer you should always fall back on who.
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