Pronouns

“Download it for free.”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Idioms, Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs

My wife saw this the other day on Oprah.com.

Problem:
“For free” is an informal idiom that bothers many readers.

Explanation:
For fun, I checked Google for the idiom “for free” (with the quotation marks) and got about 348,000,000 matches. Wow!

Many readers are bothered by the “for free” idiom because the word “for” is a preposition, prepositions should be followed by nouns or pronouns, and the word “free” is neither a noun nor a pronoun.

The word “free” is either a verb or an adjective. Some use the word “free” as an adverb — as in “running free” — but the correct way to make “free” into an adverb is to add the letters L-Y to the end — as in “running freely”.

One of the definitions of the word “free” as an adjective is without charge, cost, or payment — as in “free nachos with every beer purchased this evening”.

This gives us our solution, given that any preposition — such as “for” — should not be followed by an adjective — such as “free”.

Solution:
“Download it without charge.”

“… a guy who’s service goes down every day …”

Common English Blunders, Contractions, Pronouns

I saw this on a blog yesterday.

Problem:
A contraction appears where a pronoun is required.

Explanation:
The full sentence was something like, “I work with a guy who’s service goes down every day for an hour and a half.”

The writer used W-H-O-apostrophe-S, which is a contraction of the word “who” plus the word “is”.

What he should have put was the pronoun “whose” — spelled W-H-O-S-E — which is the possessive case of the pronoun “who” — just as “his” is the possessive case of the pronoun “he”.

Solution:
“… a guy whose service goes down every day …”

“One” as a Pronoun

Outsider's Perspective, Pronouns

I was thinking about this over the last few days, so I had to review a dictionary for the definitions of the word “one”.

A definition of “one” as a pronoun is an indefinite person of a kind understood by the context.

British English says that the pronoun “one” can replace the singular pronoun “I”, but American English extends this to replacing the singular pronoun “you” as well as the singular pronouns “he”, “she”, or “it”.

For example:

  1. “Mum was acting strangely, and one should have noticed it.” can mean “Mum was acting strangely, and I should have noticed it.”
  2. “It was as delicious as one would expect.” can mean “It was as delicious as you would expect.”
  3. “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as one could desire.” can mean “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as he or she could desire.”

There you have it — a pronoun that can be a first-person pronoun, a second-person pronoun, or a third-person pronoun. No wonder English can be so difficult to learn as a second language!