I have come across this sentence in an article I’m editing:
“Is there no hope for all us women who suffer from this problem?”
I think that the accusative “us” should be replaced by the nominative “we”, since it forms part of the clause “We women who suffer from this problem”. My colleagues disagree, pointing that “there is no hope for us” would use the accusative. Yes, I say, but “us” in that case is not the subject of a verb as it is in the above sentence. Isn’t it?
As it happens, I have rewritten the sentence to get round the problem (always the best option, I find ) but who is correct? Feel free to prove one so-called copy editor (either me or my boss) wrong…
I love the movie Never Cry Wolf. It’s one of my favorite films.
My husband loves the movie Never Cry Wolf. It’s one of his favorite films.
Here’s where I get into trouble when trying to combine our love for the film. What is the correct way?
Never Cry Wolf is one of my husband and my’s favorite films.
Never Cry Wolf is one of my husband and my favorite films.
Is there a better way?
Should I just go with the longer “My husband and I love Never Cry Wolf. It’s one of our favorite films.”?
(Do I use both a period AND a question mark there?)
Your problem, Colophon, lies in the clause that I underscored. You were not thinking through what a clause really is – a subordinate unit in a sentence that is grammatically and logically a complete sentence (albeit often with an odd word in it courtesy of the conjunction, pronoun, or adjective functioning to link it to the rest of the sentence). “We women who suffer…” is not a clause but the clause “who suffer from this problem” along with its antececent “We women” – which is a sentence fragment unless “we women” are the agent, recipient, beneficiary, means, accompaniment, location, apostrophic salutation, or some other grammatical connection to something else. “We women who suffer should cast off our chains” is accurate – and “We women” becomes the subject. But in the sentence you parsed above, “us women” is a the object of the preposition “for” – and it might be recast as “We women who suffer from this problem have no hope,” where “we women” becomes the subject.
Equipoise, your best bet is to avoid the prenominal possessive altogether: “Never Cry Wolf is one of the favorite films of both my husband and [me/myself].” (Older grammars say that “myself” should only be used when it has “I/me” as antecedent; stylistically, the parallelism of “my husband and myself” seems to make that construction more euphonious.)
Polycarp, thanks for that. It makes it a lot clearer. I don’t know quite how or why I thought “we women who suffer from this problem” constituted a valid sentence. My only excuse is that it’s Friday and I got home from work last night about seven hours before I had to leave for work this morning.
Or the hypothetical feminist rejoinder to Terry Pratchet: Wee Free Women?
There’s probably a parallel to Godwin’s Law here: As any thread on language use grows, it inexorably and with ever increasing probability heads for a volley of terrible puns.
Choosing the sentence that sounds best doesn’t necessarily give you the right one though - and in any case, the original sentence isn’t exactly a thing of beauty, hence the rewrite.
Unless you’re an elementary school teacher with a bug up your butt about enforcing arbitrary grammar ‘rules’ set forth by idiots in the seventeenth century trying to model English on Latin, it most certainly does. What is ‘right’ beyond effective use of language?
Yeah, it wasn’t gonna win you any Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes for Literature.
) but who is correct? Feel free to prove one so-called copy editor (either me or my boss) wrong…
