Hi,
I have a question regarding the use of “he” and “him” as a direct object. Are the following sentences correct? Would both be grammatically correct? The first one sounds a little but is it wrong? I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
“The school has had few such gifted students as he”.
“The school has had few gifted students such as him”
If it is a direct object, the objective case is necessary. A better constructive sentence would be: “The school has had few gifted students like him.”
The first sentence is elliptical. It finishes with a subordinate clause that omits the verb. Its full rendering is:
“The school has had few such gifted students as he is”.
I thought of that, and that may be correct. It is the problem with the Winston commercial: " Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" or “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.” The latter is correct because it is a simile and not a metaphor. (Winston is a cigarette.) So, I guess by the same reasoning you are correct, as he is a student.
Correct.
The phrasing (word order) here seems a bit awkward. I would normally expect something like “He’s remarkable – the school has had few such gifted students” or “The school has had few students as gifted as he.”
The latter makes it a bit easier to see the complete construction “The school has had few students as gifted as he is gifted,” which normally leaves out the is gifted as being understood and thus redundant.
It is neither a simile nor a metaphor. It is a direct statement. A simile is “a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind”. A metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” So they both are comparisons to things they are not literally like. It’s difficult for me to imagine either not having a noun in them – a noun describing the dissimilar thing. Here as you point out, Winston is a cigarette.
You will never get any agreement on such questions. I am happy to treat “as” as a preposition in the first sentence and use “him”, but if you want to call it an ellipsis and use “he”, go right ahead. The second just sounds dreadful, but that doesn’t mean it is ungrammatical.
The kind of sentence that really grates on me is something like: “It is time for John and I to leave”. It doesn’t matter whether you treat “I” as the object of the preposition or the subject of the infinitive, it has to be “me”.
FWIW, googling “one such as I” returns 21 million results, while “one such as me” returns 98,000.
Infinitives do not have subjects. If John is not there, the sentence becomes “It is time for me to leave” (or For me, it is time to leave), not “It is time for I to leave.”
See, to my ear, “as he” is the one that sounds dreadful. I’ve grown up with people saying “You’re not as good as me!” and even “That’s him!” Putting a subject pronoun at the end of a sentence just sounds wrong to me.
I know it isn’t, but it grates.
Once upon a time the nominative would have been considered the proper usage, whether by agreement with the subject of the verb, or because a verb is assumed to have been elided, and you will find plenty of examples recorded until well into the 20th century. But usage has made the accusative more or less the norm.
I’d have recast the sentence simply as “The school has had few students so gifted”, if only to avoid nitpickers like me.
As far as I am concerned, unless there is lack of clarity or great aural dissonance, it is plain wrong to correct uttered grammar, or, really, even to object to it. People talk the way they talk and usually make a fair effort to be understood. If you are hard-pressed to parse and comprehend what a person says, you have the option of asking for clarification. Written language is where the rules of grammar need to be applied more strictly, because the writer may not be available to explain what the ever loving fuck that is supposed to mean. I know I often speak right on the edge of unintelligible, mashing words together, sometimes relying on cadence and intonation to support my spoken slop (though I do speak with textbook clarity when I need to), but my writing is almost always fairly precise, to the point of rigidly avoiding contraction’s.
Thank you all. Very helpful.
davidmich
“Whaddaya want, good grammar or good taste?”
But not avoiding apostrophes? 