Putting Lipstick on a Pig
By Grammar Guru
Why do those pesky pronouns persist in rearing their problematic pates? Part of the reason could be a lack of understanding about types of pronouns and how they work.
What if you are not a grammar guru and aren’t interested in learning about subjective case, objective case, and possessive case pronouns? Can you still learn to use pronouns correctly without knowing grammatical terminology?
Thankfully for the grammatically challenged, the answer is yes.
Few of us over the age of three, for example, are likely to say, “Him plans to go to class today.” We instinctively know that the pronoun should be “He.” We just picked that bit of information up by listening to grownups speak. The reason we use “he” rather than “him” is that we need a pronoun which can be used as the subject of the sentence (thus a subjective case pronoun).
Typically, however, errors in pronoun usage occur in compound constructions. Many have trouble knowing which pronoun to use if the pronoun is joined with “and” to another subject in a compound construction. Do we say “Him and me plan to go to the movie,” “Him and I plan to go to the movie,” or “He and I plan to go to the movie”? Or do we avoid the whole problem by deciding to stay at home?
The correct pronoun choice in a compound construction can be discovered by breaking the sentence into two: Say “Him plan(s) to go to the movie,” and “Me plan(s) to go to the movie.” Obviously, both of these choices are wrong. That’s because both of the pronouns are objective case pronouns, not the needed subjective case forms.
So next we may try “Him and I plan to go to the movies.” Broken into two sentences, we say “Him plan(s) to go to the movie” and “I plan to go to the movie.” We are halfway there! “I” is correct, but the “him” is still wrong.
Technically what we have done in joining “Him and I” together is that we have unequally yoked a subjective case pronoun with an objective case pronoun. Or—to put it in current political parlance, we have put lipstick on a pit bull—or a pig, depending upon your political persuasion.
If you prefer to leave politics completely out of the discussion, you might say it’s like wearing plaid walking shorts with a tux jacket. It just isn’t pretty.
Many well-educated people sometimes make this kind of mistake, especially in prepositional phrases. In an attempt to be correct, people sometimes “hypercorrect” by saying something like “Would you like to go to lunch with Mark and I?”
When I hear that, clanging sounds go off in my head, I swoon, and someone has to scrape me off the floor because the speaker has unequally joined two words together. What the speaker has literally said is “Would you like to go to lunch with Mark? Would you like to go to lunch with I?” The “I” may sound pretty and educated, but it is simply the wrong pronoun. In that sentence we need to use “me.” “Would you like to go to lunch with (Mark and) me?”
It should come as no surprise that there is a grammatical reason to use “me” in the above sentence. For those of you who are still reading and may have a touch of the grammar guru in you, the reason is that for objects of prepositions we need to use objective case pronouns. (See the connection? Isn’t that clever?) But the above speaker has come up with a sentence that sounds neither educated nor pretty.
That pit bull (or pig) is wearing lipstick again!
Would someone keep him out of my makeup bag, PLEASE!
(For more information on pronoun usage and pronoun case, visit http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_proncase.html. )
