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.

Sandy H., a teacher friend, shared this bit of news today: Birmingham, England’s second largest city, has decided to formally eliminate the apostrophe from all of the city’s street signs. So St. Paul’s Square becomes St. Pauls Square. The reason? According to the city council, apostrophes are confusing and old-fashioned.

Read articles about the ban from the the Associated Press and the London Daily Mail.