This Could be Tricky

Third panel, last word.

Should that be “him” or “he”? It depends on what he means.

• “As much as him” means they love reading as much as they love him. (That’s the objective case, correct for a direct object.)
• “As much as he” would mean they love reading as much as he does. (Nominative case, subject of loves.)
• I can see wolves loving to eat him, but I don’t think that’s what the sheep would hope for.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Kerning is the typographic practice of adjusting the space between letters to the letters all look the same distance apart. This is something that old-fashioned typewriters weren’t very good at—they compressed the letter “m” and stretched out the letter “i” because the carriage moved the same distance for every letter. Modern proportional fonts manage the space that each letter takes up so the distance between proportional letters looks the same. Modern word processing software allows you to manually adjust the kerning, which is handy when you use display fonts in large sizes.

Here the kerning is so strong, the letters actually overlap and the shape of the “V” is adjusted to make the kerning look right. Kerning doesn’t normally change the shape of a letter, hence my use of the word “extreme.”

I looked up the acronym online, and discovered that it can stand for a lot of things! So I guess this post remains safely typographic and not political.

Clever use of a suffix.

Actually, “vape” has been around for a while, but it’s still a rather new word. “Vapid” has been around for a long time, making the comic clever.

“Who” appears in all three panels. Are they correct?

Ready for the answers?

Panel 1: correct. “who” is the subject of the clause, which is nominative, so “who.”

Panel 2: incorrect! The object of a preposition (“to”) should be in the objective case, so “whom.”

Panel 3: correct. “who” is a predicate nominative (after “that is”), so “who.”

So how did you do?

PS—I found another example of a wrong “whom.” Second panel. The “whomever” is the subject of the sentence, so it should be “whoever”:

Can you see both goofs? Here’s the comic:

Second panel.

Okay, first even though it’s idiomatic, it’s bad writing. He used a false subject. That’s when you say something like “there is” or “there are” or “it is.” The first word in those pairs doesn’t mean anything. False subject. Write what the actual subject is.

The other goof is that “their” is the wrong spelling! If you’re gonna have a false subject, it’s “there.”

Sigh.