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In a recent Daily Show episode, Jon Stewart said this (position: 00:40 in video):
Can the rest of us get us one of them thousand-foot gun-free perimeters?
I am not a native speaker, so I am interested whether or not the above sentence is grammatically correct. Please be specific.
Can the rest of us get us one of them thousand foot gun free perimeters?
There are two things 'wrong' with this.
1) 'get us' - where get is reflexive, we'd say "get ourselves", not "get us".
2) 'one of them' - should be 'one of those'.
I haven't seen the clip, but knowing the Daily Show, it's important to understand that John Stewart wasn't 'trying to sound uneducated' (as Robusto has it); rather, he's mocking the uneducated by caricaturing how they might speak. My guess, given it's relating to gun control, is aping how a Texan red-neck might speak if he ever realised that gun ownership is ridiculous (I'm not stating my view; this is what Stewart is implying).
People do sometimes use 'them' for 'those' to appear less educated than they are, but this is not Stewart's intention here.
No. The pronoun that should be used is "those" as in
Get us one of those thousand-foot perimeters.
Using them instead is bad grammar and sounds low-class. In fact, when people are trying to sound uneducated (as, say, in acting or humor), substituting them for those is probably the most common way of achieving the effect. John Stewart was obviously doing just that.
