She Knows the Weakness of Pronouns

This is a quote from a post on Facebook from the Icelandic chicken group:

This is my best friend’s hen.. her name is Hildigard (the hen) and she is 10 years old… anyone else here with old ladies that they would like to share a picture of?

I bolded the text where she clears up the main problem with using pronouns—ambiguity of antecedent. What, exactly, does the pronoun refer to? That’s why I recommend you avoid using pronouns.

By the way, here is a picture of Hildegard.

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Sometimes, when you read a sentence with two modifiers or two antecedents, you can find it confusing to decide which modifier goes with which part of the sentence. Then you have to pause and figure out the most logical meaning. Take a look at this sentence:

The vapor trails were observed dispersing from several ground stations.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190408.html

Okay, we have two antecedents here. Were the trails “observed from several ground stations” or were they “dispersing from several ground stations”?

Lots of times you can solve the ambiguity by changing the order of part of the sentence.

• The vapor trails from several ground stations were observed dispersing.
• The vapor trails were observed from several ground stations dispersing.
• The vapor trails were dispersing observed from several ground stations.
• The dispersing vapor trails were observed from several ground stations.
• Several ground stations observed the dispersing vapor trails.
  

The first three are all pretty awkward; the fourth one is better, but it implies the existence of vapor trails that weren’t dispersing. The last one is best, and notice it doesn’t use the passive!

I’ve been cheating on you. Here’s the context:

The atmosphere over northern Norway appeared quite strange for about 30 minutes last Friday when colorful clouds, dots, and plumes suddenly appeared. The colors were actually created by the NASA-funded Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment (AZURE) which dispersed gas tracers to probe winds in Earth’s upper atmosphere . AZURE’s tracers originated from two short-lived sounding rockets launched from the Andya Space Center in Norway. The harmless gases, trimethylaluminum and a barium / strontium mixture, were released into the ionosphere at altitudes of 115 and 250 km. The vapor trails were observed dispersing from several ground stations.

Since the context tells so much about the vapor trails, you don’t need to describe them again in the last sentence. Just add the new information; say this:

The vapor trails were observed from several ground stations.

Or

Several ground stations observed the vapor trails.

And here’s a picture:

The rule is that a pronoun is supposed to refer to the noun closest before it (the antecedent), so the cartoonist has a point.

The closest noun is “tires”…

Let’s start with some rules

• An antecedent is a word toward the front of a sentence that a word farther along in the sentence (called the proform) refers to.
• Antecedents and proforms have to agree, which means they have the same grammatical form (both have to be singular or both plural, for example.)
• “Who” refers to people, “that” refers to non-people

Here are two examples, both from this article:

This news organization sat down with Crandall at Attivo’s headquarters to discuss the company’s work for customers, which include consumer-goods companies, tech firms, law offices, and government agencies.

Okay, is it the comany’s work or the company’s customers that’s included? It’s the customers! Even besides the list making sense as a list of customers, both “customers” and the proform, “include” are plural. So the grammar tells you, too.

There is this very advanced set of attackers that will use all sorts of social engineering to figure out how to get around the security systems.

“That” goes with non-humans, right? And attackers are human, right? So it should be “who will use etc.” right? But “set” is a math term, right? Non-human, right? Well… the context indicates that this is a set of humans, so I think “who” is still appropriate. (And “will use” can be either singular or plural, so that’s no help.) But that’s the editor in me.

What does the editor in you say?

First, look at the comic. It’s the second speech bubble.

First, a rule:

Who is some kind of a subject
Whom is some kind of an object.

Is the word a subject or an object? How else might you say that sentence?

• You could say, “Who are ‘they’?” That would make the word a subject, so “who,” not “whom.”
• You could say, “They are who(m)?” Since the verb is a form of “to be,” the word is a predicate nominative, so we still get “who” not “whom.”
• Maybe look for an antecedent, which would be in the speech bubble in the upper right. That has “they’re doing,” short for “they are doing.” Still a subject, so we’re still stuck with “who,” not “whom.”

The gal in the glasses is incorrect, using a pretentiousism. Maybe she takes after her mom, who also makes lots of mistakes.