Sigh. Use the Nominative for Your Subjects

It’s we do things, not us do things. Just because you throw in some extra words doesn’t mean you can change that. Third panel.

Harrumpf. Get it right. Don’t be a Tareyton smoker.

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One of my favorite hobby horses—getting “whom” correct.

Subordinate clauses are stumbling blocks for a lot of people because these clauses often put the direct object first, where the subject usually goes. So the nominative form, “who” gets used, even though the actual subject is “you.”

Whenever you have a who/whom decision to make, first decide what is the verb, then look for the subject. Then decide whether the “who” word is the subject or the object. “Who” is a subject, “whom” is an object.

Did you know that infinitives can have a subject? Normally we think of the infinitive form of a verb as the form we use when we refer to the verb itself; it’s the citation form. We use it to mean the verb itself without anyone doing anything about it. Think of Shakespeare’s famous line in Hamlet:

To be or not to be, that is the question.

In fact, this construction treats the verb itself as a noun.

But that’s not the funny thing I’m thinking of regarding infinitives. The funny thing is (1) that infinitives can have a subject, just like a regular verb and (2) the subject is not in the nominative case!  Sometimes the subject is in the possessive. In Tennyson, for example:

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:

Usually the subject is in the objective case:

He helped me to fix the car
I want him to get the prize

Which leads me to the Pickles comic that encouraged me to think about all this. (She gets it wrong, by the way—should be “whom.”)

Back in the days of yore, when cigarette companies were allowed to advertise in magazines, an ad created a big row by having the headline “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.”

I think every English teacher in the country was up in arms for their usage of the objective case (us) for the subject of a sentence. I recall at the time that saying things like “Us kids all hate English” sounded fairly normal, though I understood the distinction. I think the English teachers won that battle, because I haven’t heard or seen that construction for a long time. Then this appeared:

Us humans are pretty good at making our presence felt wherever we live out our resource-intensive lives.

It’s in an article about the Pacific Northwest in New Atlas. Take out the word “humans” and the mistake becomes immediately obvious.

Now a test: is this sentence correct?

Most of us humans are pretty good at making our presence felt wherever we live out our resource-intensive lives.

If you said it’s correct, good for you! The subject of the sentence is “Most,” and “us humans” is the object of “of,” so now the objective case is appropriate.

I hope the writer was just trying to be old-fashioned.

I hardly ever get comments to this blog, but I posted a link to one of my posts on Google+ the other day, and a friend made a comment that’s not only worth repeating, but it deserves a post! Go follow the link if you want to see the cause for the comment. Here’s his comment:

I think I get it right most of the time…but still have a hard time saying, “Whom do you think you are!?”….the other thing you taught me and I keep forgetting is where the quote marks go in a sentence…not sure I got it right above…

Lorin Walker (a former boss, by the way, and still a friend) says he has trouble saying “whom do you think you are?” Well, he should have trouble saying that, but not for the reason he thinks! We usually put the subject first in English, and the nominative (subject) form of the word is indeed “who.” So we’re used to putting “who” at the beginning of a sentence.

With questions, however, the subject generally doesn’t come first, the object does, and that’s where “whom” comes in. So you generally start a question with “whom.” Except for one thing: the type of verb.

Remember predicate nominatives? They look like direct objects, except they go with linking verbs (mainly some form of “to be” but also other verbs that are equivalent to an equals sign, such as seem and appear.) So in Lorin’s example sentence, the first word goes with (is the predicate nominative of) the last word, “are”! He could say “Who do you thing you are?” with impunity, and be so correct that he’d fool a lot of amateur grammar nazis.

PS: I just now saw a headline, in the Los Angeles Times, no less:

Who does your member of Congress support for president?