Who Goes First?

I suspect that more than once in grade school you experienced a conversation something like this:

You: Hey! Me and Tommy want to go swing on the swings.

Teacher: Tommy and I.

This correction of two mistakes at once has led to the unfortunate habit, mostly in the better educated, of saying things like “…between Tom and I.”

We’ve been over the issue of case before. (Subjects use I and objects use me.)

But what about putting Tom first? If you followed that link, You saw that the end of the post makes passing reference to that question of why Tom goes first, but I want to go into it a little more now. (If you didn’t follow the link: I said that the reason for putting Tom first is humility, not grammar.)  That’s not quite the whole rule. The rest of the rule is:

Put the most important one first.

I see this exercised a lot in scientific writing. Suppose your team led the research, but others participated, too. Putting your team first makes sense because it fits the relationship. I ran into this recently in the March 2016 Scientific American, page 68, near the top of the first column:

We and other developmental biologists have spent the past few decades trying to understand how this cellular orientation system works.

The article is mainly about their team, but they want to give credit to others working in the same field. That’s okay. In fact, it’s humble to include the others at all.

Now you and Tommy can go play on the swing in peace!

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One principle of expository writing is that it be clear. This means, partly, that you can immediately tell what each word means. Many many words have more than one meaning, so you have to be careful if you want to be clear.

If you want to be funny, though (an antithesis, perhaps, of writing clearly) these multiple-meaning words provide a font of material. Here’s a comic, Fox Trot, that makes passing reference to correct use of case (I/me) but uses two words ambiguously to create humor. Can you tell what the two words are?

It occurred to me that a third word, “English,” could also have two meanings—the country or the language. (Snicker.)

That is, I should repeat mentioning it so you won’t do it! I’m pretty sure nobody memorizes my little grammar lessons, and besides, repetition is the mother of learning, right?

Anyway, in English, we use the objective case for words that are objects of prepositions and direct objects. That means me instead of I, them instead of they. Other languages, that have more cases, can use any of several other cases with prepositions. We say their prepositions take the accusative, or the dative, or the genitive. But nobody uses the nominative with prepositions. Nominative is reserved for the subjects of sentences.

English speakers tend to get confused when their prepositions and  verbs have a compound object. I think this error descends from a common correction in sixth grade English class that I won’t get into right now. So we say, the prize goes to Bill and Bob, or Tom whipped Bill and Bob, which are correct. (Nouns in English don’t show case except for the possessive.) But when we use pronouns (which do show case), lots of folks revert to the nominative, and they say it the way the third cell in this comic says it. I’m pretty sure Scott Meyer knows the correct way to use a compound direct object, but he drew his character as someone who doesn’t. Thank you, Scott, for giving me a good example of what not to say!

I don’t think it’s correct for a kid to whip his parents, but if Dad is describing it, he should say, “his mother and me.”

I know I mention case a lot, but I like to post comics about grammar, and I happened to run into one that uses case both correctly and incorrectly in a construction that can be tricky to get right—comparison. First the comic.

I like Scott Meyer’s work because of his clever humor. Apparently that’s Scott on the right. I don’t know if the fellow on the left represents an actual person, but usually he’s the one who makes the mistakes. This time he gets it right and Scott makes the mistake. Look at the first speech.

I heard the boss yelling. Did you tell him that you’re smarter than him again?

Remember the last post, about copulatives and predicate nominatives? Yup, he should have said “…you’re smarter than he.” The uncompressed sentence is “…that you are smarter than he is.” “He” sounds correct now, doesn’t it?

Go to the last cell, first speech.

Why shouldn’t I be able to tell people that I’m smarter than they?

“They” is correct! The expanded sentence is “…I am smarter than they are.” Sounds right, doesn’t it?

As a footnote, I should point out that the captions on to two last cells use “its” and “it’s” correctly. But you noticed that, didn’t you?

Most of the time when you run into a lesson about who and whom, it’s about using whom when you want to use who. I’ve even posted about it. (Search the site for “whom” for a few other examples.) Usually these articles compare the subject (who) with the direct object or object of a preposition (whom).

There’s another time to use “who,” but first a little background. In Indo-European and Semitic languages at least, the verb “to be” and its various forms and equivalents (seem, appear)  are somewhat special. “To be” etc. is equivalent to an equals sign , and the name for this kind of verb is a copulative. Your grade school teacher probably called them linking verbs. Copulatives couple things together. That means that a noun at the end of a sentence that uses a copulative isn’t a direct object. It’s a predicate nominative.

For example:

Tom is a dentist. Tom and Dave are dentists. They are good dentists, and they are also my cousins.

If we use and equals sign in place of the verb, the meaning is the same:

Tom = dentist; Tom and Dave = dentists.

Predicate nominatives have the same case as the subject, even though they might be where you expect a direct object. It’s the verb’s fault. Copulatives take the nominative, we say. (“We” being linguists, grammarians, and now you, I hope.) So this guy approaches the pearly gates, and St. Peter asks who it is. “It is I,” says the man. Peter mutters to himself, “Ah, an English teacher.”

So be alert! Use “who” with linking verbs. Here’s an example of a professional writer (and his editor, apparently) in a Live Science article who wasn’t paying attention:

There’s no telling whom the original owner of the teeth and finger was, but the cave where they were discovered was both a hermitage, or dwelling place, and the site of a grisly medieval massacre. [8 Disturbing Archaeological Discoveries]

That “whom” really grates. It’s not only at the beginning, where you expect nominatives, but it’s with a linking verb, which takes the nominative.

So there you have it. Two times to use who, not whom. As subjects and with linking verbs.