You Don’t Say

Political campaign television ads are annoying at best. Here in Los Angeles, where we have an election next week, Wendy Greuel, a member of the city council who wants to be City Controller, is running an ad that drives me crazy.

The ad presents her as a fiscal watchdog. One of her claims goes like this:

“The city gave 5.7 million dollars in loans, only now they don’t remember who they gave it to.”

Whether that claim is true or not I don’t know (although I’m skeptical since the city council would have had to approve these so-called loans). What I do know is that Ms. Greuel and her campaign staff need a refresher course in pronoun usage. It’s one thing to speak informally at a Kiwanis breakfast and flub your grammar. It’s quite another thing to script a television commercial and write in Grammar 101 flubs.

So, Ms. Greuel, here’s my campaign contribution: Hire a proofreader! A good proofer would have flagged these flubs:

Flub #1 and #2: You can’t use they (a plural pronoun) to refer to city (a singular noun). The correct pronoun to use to refer to city would be it.

Flub #3: The misuse of who, which is a subject pronoun. What’s needed here is the object pronoun whom–”they don’t remember whom….”

Better yet, here’s what you could have said:

“The City of Los Angeles can’t account for 5.7 million dollars in loans to [fill in the blank].

Point made–simply, clearly, grammatically.

Barack Obama must have felt a flush of exhiliration when he stepped onto the stage in Chicago to give his first news conference as president-elect. His first words when he saw the roomful of reporters were “Oh, wow.” Aside from his comment about Nancy Reagan’s seances, he didn’t stumble, at least not politically.

But he did cause me to wince a couple of times when he mixed up his pronouns.

Here’s how Obama responded when he was asked about a planned meeting with President Bush:

“Well, President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to meet with him and First Lady Laura Bush. We are gratified by the invitation.”

“Michelle and I“? Wrong. It should have been “Michelle and me.”

Quick review:

• I is a subject pronoun (Michelle and I are going to the White House).
• Me is an object pronoun (President Bush invited Michelle and me to the White House).

Obama’s mistake is all too common. People are always mixing up their pronouns, especially in spoken language. Obama never would have said “President Bush invited I to meet him….”Yet he stumbled over the compound object when he included Michelle.

Responding to the same question, Obama went on the say, “I’m sure that in addition to a tour of the White House, there is going to be a substantive conversation between myself and the president.”

“Between myself and the president”? Poor choice.

In the first place, don’t use a reflexive pronoun like myself by itself. A reflexive pronoun needs a partner in the form of a noun or other pronoun: Despite the recession, I’m going to treat myself to a new pair of shoes.

Second, don’t use myself in place of I or me. There’s nothing immodest about correctly using the pronouns I and me.  But there’s nothing modest–in fact, there’s something peculiar–about using myself as a substitute for I or me.

And remember mom’s admonishment to put the other person first? In this case, that would have been the right thing to do. Obama should have said, “…there’s going to be a substantive conversation between the president and me.”

As Donna in the new movie musical Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep sings the wistful ballad “Slipping Through My Fingers.” Her daughter is about to be married and Donna reflects in song how quickly her only child has grown up.

It’s a lovely moment in the film, and Streep carries it off beautifully. Except when she sings these lyrics:

Sleep in her eyes
Her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake.

Her and me? Fingernails on a chalkboard.

OK, I know they’re only song lyrics, and songwriters (Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, in this case) get a certain amount of poetic license when it comes to usage. But there’s no rhyme scheme to preserve here, and the correct pronouns–she and I–sound fine to me. Maybe her and me is easier to sing. I don’t know, but the line sure sounds awkward to this listener.

Anyway, the movie is fun, maybe not as much as fun as the stage show, but worth the price of a ticket, despite the pronoun lapse.

Billionaire Eli Broad (as in road) and his wife, Edythe, are among the richest and most philanthropic couples in America. In September 2007 they gave $20 million to the Center of Regenerative and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.  Mazel tov—they’re doing their part for medical research. Of course, he’ll get a building named after him for that little gesture.

With multi-million dollar donations come, naturally, press interviews. When Mr. Broad was interviewed on one of LA’s public radio stations about the donation and what it said about him, he responded, “What it says about Edie and I is we’re interested in giving back and improving the human condition.” 

About Edie and I?? The subject pronoun I used as the object of the preposition about? What he should have said was “What it says about Edie and me….”  Sorry, Mr. Broad, no English department chairs named after you this month.

We peons can take some comfort in Mr. Broad’s grammar slip-up—even billionaires screw up the English language.