LANGUAGE CORNER
by Evan Jenkins

"Older Than Him"
Do We Have an Understanding?
Sometimes sentences have to be written with words that are not seen, but understood to be there. This was one: "His brother John, who is five years older than him, and George, who is three years older than him, both became doctors." Even in casual conversation, that's illiterate. The reason is a little word that doesn't appear: "is." What the writer meant to say is that the brothers were five and three years "older than he is." So make it "older than he" or, less stiltedly, plain old "older than he is." But never, unless obliged to quote illiterate speech precisely, "older than him."

addendum, 5/13/98:
The error can arise in the plural, too: "They have found a team as dysfunctional and foolish as them." The word "are" being understood, the sentence has to read "...as they." Or better yet, "as they are."

addendum, 1/20/99:
On a similar matter, Margery Simmons of Orlando, from a family "replete with teachers," e-mailed to express annoyance with "the now prevalent use of the wrong case for pronouns in prepostional phrases," adding, "I have the feeling that I would still be in eighth grade if I had said, '... gave it to she and I.' "

Eighth grade (or earlier) is indeed around the time we ought to have learned that the pronouns that are used as subjects -- I, we, he, she, they, who -- can't be used as objects. In this case "she and I" are objects of the preposition "to." Probably no English-speaker would ever write or say "to she," but somehow people do write things like "to she and I." Two wrongs don't make a right. The right way, of course, is "to her and me."

 

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