Pronouns

“… a long-time friend of myself.”

Common English Blunders, Pronouns

I heard this on a radio program today.

Problem:
The speaker used the wrong pronoun.

Explanation:
The pronoun “myself” can be used properly in two ways:

  1. as an INTENSIVE of “I” or “me”: I repaired the car myself.
  2. REFLEXIVELY in place of “me”: I hit myself when I left the building.

Unfortunately, it is becoming an increasingly common English blunder to put “myself” where it does not belong.

Specifically, “myself” is used improperly — in place of the personal pronouns “I” and “me” — in three ways:

  • as a SUBJECT: Myself was the person who accidentally deleted the file.
  • as an OBJECT: They gave the award to myself.
  • as a COMPLEMENT: Today’s teacher is myself.

Misuse of “myself” has become so common that I hear it almost every day now. These days, even supposedly educated U.S. presidential hopefuls such as Barack Obama are using “myself” where it does not belong.

The solution to the problematic phrase heard on the radio comes from using (instead of “myself”) the pronoun that means something that belongs to me.

Solution:
“… a long-time friend of mine.”

“… for the both of us.”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Conjunctions, Hypercorrection, Pronouns

My wife heard this a couple of days ago on television.

Problem:
The definite article “the” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The word “both” is an adjective that means two together (e.g., “I saw both suspects.”), a pronoun that means the one as well as the other (e.g., “Both of them were flying to Paris.”, or a conjunction that means alike or equally (e.g., “Jim is both tall and handsome.”).

It’s clear, then, that the word “both” was used as a pronoun in the phrase that my wife heard.

Pronouns do not take articles in front of them, so “the both” is always incorrect.

Beyond that, one can see that “the” (or “a”) should never precede “both” in a sentence.

For fun, I searched Google for “the both” (with quotation marks) and got about 2,130,000 matches. Some of those matches were for grammatically correct forms such as “the Both Sides Now album”; most, though, were incorrect.

I believe that this common English blunder sometimes indicates hypercorrection: if “both” is good, then “the both” must be better. Wrong!

Solution:
“… for both of us.”

“HIS & HER’S WALK-IN CLOSET”

Possessives, Pronouns

I saw this yesterday in a real-estate advertisement.

Problem:
“HER’S” is a nonsense word.

Explanation:
The pronoun “her” is:

  • the objective case of the pronoun “she” (e.g., “Give this green handbag to her.”);
  • the possessive case of the pronoun “she” used as an attributive adjective (e.g., “Her handbag is the green one.”);
  • the dative case of the pronoun “she” (e.g., “I gave her the green handbag.”).

The pronoun “hers” is a a form of the possessive case of the pronoun “she” used as a predicate adjective (e.g., “The green handbag is hers.”).

In contrast, “her’s” is a nonsense word.

The woman who wrote the real-estate ad meant to say that the walk-in closet was suitable for a man and a woman simultaneously, and she could have used “her” or “hers”:

  • Using “HIS-&-HER” would have meant that she wanted to say that the walk-in closet would be equally possessed by the man and woman.
  • Using “HIS-&-HERS” would have meant that she wanted to say that the walk-in closet had a “his” area and a “hers” area.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks to avoid modified forms) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “hers” — 23,800,000 matches
  • “her’s” — 1,290,000 matches

Although some of the “hers” matches related to acronyms (e.g., for Higher Education Resource Services), this still tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of some 18.4:1, which is okay, but the fact that the Web contains more than one million instances of “her’s” is disappointing.

Solutions:
“HIS-&-HER WALK-IN CLOSET”
or
“HIS-&-HERS WALK-IN CLOSET”