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.

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“Forever” is an adverb. Objects of prepositions need to be nouns, pronouns, or noun clauses, not adverbs.

So the humor is misdirection. You expect the gal in the third panel to correct the mistaken object of the preposition “in,” instead of express an opinion about baseball.

Not standard circumstance.

The problem with this error is that it’s two errors (putting yourself first and using “me” instead of “I”) and grade school teachers tend to correct both at once. Consequently, their students tend to use “I” even when they should use “me.”

So:

• Use “I” when it’s a subject
• Use “me” when it’s the object of a preposition
• Be humble—mention the other guy first.

Okay, they should make her look more glamorous, because she’s got good grammar technique! (Am I biased???) She’s suggesting they take out the plural to see how their sentence sounds.

The grammar rule is to use the objective case (me) after a preposition. We get this correct when the object is alone, but for some reason, people often don’t do this when they have a compound object.

Make her look more like my wife.

Middle panel:

Why is it “we” and not “us”? Isn’t this like the slogan “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch”? (That should date you if you remember that one.)

Well, “[x] students are behaving” is a subordinate clause (It’s a noun clause acting as the direct object of “observe”) and clauses have subjects. The subject is “x students.”

Why two words for the subject? It’s called an appositive. Examples: Blacksmith Bob, Farmer Jones, Bill the salesman. You could remove either word from the phrase and you’d have essentially the same meaning.

“We” is for subjects, and “us” is for objects, so there you have it.

And get rid of those Tareytons.