Kirk Mahoney . com

I heard this from a small boy the other day.

Problem:
The word “ones” is unnecessary in this phrase.

Explanation:
The boy said a sentence such as “These ones are bigger.”

The word “these” in the phrase “These ones …” is acting as a determiner.

Other examples of “these” as a determiner include:

• “I like these chocolates.”
• “Do you want these tickets?”
• “He should give her these flowers.”

Also, it is possible to pluralize the singular numerical pronoun “one”, as in the following examples:

• “I like the vanilla ones.”
• “The ones in green are tickets for the front row.”
• “Are the pink flowers the ones that he wants?”

However, when the word “ones” is preceded by a plural determiner (such as “these”), it is best to drop the word “ones”, thereby converting the determiner “these” into a demonstrative pronoun, as shown in the following examples:

• “I like these.”
• “Do you want these?”
• “He should give her these.”

Solution:
“These …”

I saw this in a letter from my state senator.

Problem:
The pronoun is incorrect.

Explanation:
The complete sentence was “The good news is that the ongoing Sunset Review of the Texas Department of Insurance is providing a unique opportunity for my colleagues and I to consider the role of the private insurance market in making health care available to Texans.” in a letter from Senator Rodney Ellis.

The correct pronoun for a “for” — F-O-R — phrase is “me”, not “I”.

For example, it is correct to say or write “a unique opportunity for me”.

Therefore, it is correct to say or write “a unique opportunity for my colleagues and me”.

The senator’s use of the pronoun “I” in “for my colleagues and I” is an example of hypercorrection.

The senator used “for my colleagues and I” as a substitute for “for my colleagues and me” because he erroneously overgeneralized from the correct use of “my colleagues and I” as the subject of a sentence.

Solution:
“… a unique opportunity for my colleagues and me …”

My wife got this in an email message recently.

Problem:
The word “you’re” is incorrect here.

Explanation:
The complete sentence in the message was “Please contact me and if you’re school is near by, I may be able to deliver them to you.”

The word “you’re” — spelled Y-O-U-APOSTROPHE-R-E — is a contraction of “you are”.

Clearly, the message writer did not intend to say “… and if you are school is near by, …”; that would be nonsensical.

Instead, the writer was referring to the reader’s school, so he should have used the possessive pronoun “your” — spelled Y-O-U-R.

I believe that the common English blunder of confusing the contraction “you’re” with the possessive pronoun “your” is due to the fact that many American English speakers mistakenly pronounce these two words in the same way.

Solution:
“… and if your school is near by, …”

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.”

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 …”

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!

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.”

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.”

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”

I heard this in a high-school commencement speech by President Bush over the weekend.

Problem:
The President used the wrong pronoun here.

Explanation:
This was part of a sentence that went along the lines of “I want you to spend your lives devoted to a cause larger than yourselves.”

The pronoun “yourselves” is a plural, second-person pronoun.

It should be used in one of two ways:

• reflexively: “You can do it yourselves.”
• for emphasis: “a group petition that you yourselves submitted”

Its use in the President’s speech followed neither of these patterns.

Instead, “a cause larger than yourselves” follows the pattern of “an X larger than Y” — for which “Y” is neither reflexive nor inserted for emphasis.

Solution:
“… a cause larger than you.”