I never had much formal grammar training so am not gifted in knowing the names of everything. Our boss changed a sentence in an office newsletter to read:
“swept both he and his wife overboard”
And obviously this is wrong; it should be:
“swept both him and his wife overboard”
since if you took his wife out of it, the phrase would be:
“swept him overboard.”
What is the correct grammatical description for why he did it wrong, so that I can present it to him in a knowledgeable enough manner to persuade him of his grammatical error?
The way you explained it was correct; he was probably justifying it to himself as saying, “this is just an inverted version of ‘he and his wife were swept overboard’”, which would also be correct.
In both cases, if you have something happening to “blank and blank”, you can either leave out one of the blanks to figure out what the other blank should be or move the words around so the existing “blank and blank” is correct, but don’t move the words around and remove one of the blanks.
With much respect and deference to Ethilrist I suggest that your boss was wrong.
Your boss’ way puts the clause into the passive voice. “He and his wife were swept” places subtly more emphasis on the victims. The active voice, “swept him & his wife” places the emphasis on whatever it was that caused the situation to exist in the first place: the thing that did the sweeping, which in my mind is more important as it is probably still out there somewhere sweeping people overboard!
In swept both him and his wife overboard, swept is a transative verb, acting on an object. The pronoun he cannot serve as the object of a verb – for that usage, him is obligatory.
Oh, and in answer to Inigo Montoya’s curiosity, it was the Mississippi River that did the sweeping. (And the guy, who was the captain of a working boat, had criminal charges filed over it, since she died and she’d been snuck onboard illegally, and his boat was underpowered for the river current, and so on. And she was his ex-wife, which also got screwed up in the telling of the story for this newsletter article which needed a lot more editing than it clearly got, but I decided to pick my battles carefully!)
That damned river, something ought to be done about it one and for all. I read somewhere that every day it dumps hundreds of tons of silt into the Gulf of Mexico–how long will we allow this to go on!?
Dude pushed his ex into the reiver. You know that, don’t you?
By the way, this (very common) grammar fault comes from all those mothers and teachers correcting us when we were little:
“Me and Billy are going to the park.”
“No, son, you mean ‘Billy and I are going to the park.’”
Somehow this gets transformed into a belief that “[Name] and [pronoun]” must always be in the subjective: he, she, I, we, etc. But that’s not true if the phrase is in the objective case, as in your example. Billy and I are going to the park, but that big kid beat up Billy and me.
Been answered already, but I’ll mention that this is a phenomenon known linguistically as hypercorrection. It’s the misapplication of a rule for “correct” (that is, the standardized “correct” speech taught in schools as opposed to “low class” dialects) speech onto wrong situations. (Just like the moronic “just between you and I”).
Of course, his wankery will just make him the laughingstock of both the educated and old money.
Alas, he is both the educated and old money. At least by local standards. (Actually, where the old money is concerned, by any standards!)
He’s actually a very nice guy. But this whole firm is populated with folks who sign off letters like:
With kindest regards, I remain
Very truly yours,
etc. Seriously old-fashioned, stilted, and archaic language. It’s rather charming, but does make it a challenge to bring them into the 20th century (I’m not trying for the 21st yet) with such things as putting periods and commas inside quotation marks. Sigh.
This falls into the “knows just enough to be dangerous” category. I’m not surprised he’s a lawyer; this kind of confindence you’re right even when you’re wrong indicates a certain kind of arrogance that lawyers and doctors tend to possess in overabundance. I’m a bit of a grammarian; I’ve had a lot of experience as a proofreader and factchecker for a textbook publisher, and I do some freelance editorial work, like proofreading and rewriting. But when I was working for doctors, I can’t tell you how many times my boss would disagree with me just because “it didn’t sound right” and decide that his status trumped my knowledge. Infuriating.
Apparently it had been right and he insisted it be changed. I pointed out to our office administrator (who actually publishes the damn thing) that it was wrong and she told me he said to change it to that and she wasn’t about to argue with an attorney. Which is when I volunteered. Hey, attorneys put their pants on one leg at a time, too – even if right now most of them are wearing seersucker suits and white shoes. Man, I feel like I walked into a timewarp in this place!
All the grammatical ammo is very helpful. I’m hoping next time around it won’t be needed – because my direct boss (the one who made the error is head of the firm) is technically the editor of the newsletter, and when I found two typos in the first paragraph alone after it was published, I informed him that from now on I will be giving it a final proof. He, at least, didn’t argue with me.
This is an ongoing battle for me. The firm I work for now (architects) seem to see their document sloppiness as a point of pride. They seem to be under the impression that inconsistency of format and typos and sloppy grammar communicate to prospective clients that they pay attention to the *important * stuff, and won’t waste billable time hunting down stray commas. But still, they make fun of sloppy proposals they get from from prospective subcontractors, and definitely subtract points for such documents. I can’t make them see that other people will react the same way to their stuff.
