Wendy Flubs It
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.