{"id":239,"date":"2008-05-21T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T18:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/his-hers-walk-in-closet\/"},"modified":"2008-05-21T12:29:39","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T18:29:39","slug":"his-hers-walk-in-closet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/05\/his-hers-walk-in-closet\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;HIS &#038; HER&#8217;S WALK-IN CLOSET&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this yesterday in a real-estate advertisement.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Problem:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;HER&#8217;S&#8221; is a nonsense word.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Explanation:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe pronoun &#8220;her&#8221; is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the objective case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; (e.g., &#8220;Give this green handbag to her.&#8221;);<\/li>\n<li>the possessive case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; used as an attributive adjective (e.g., &#8220;Her handbag is the green one.&#8221;);<\/li>\n<li>the dative case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; (e.g., &#8220;I gave her the green handbag.&#8221;).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The pronoun &#8220;hers&#8221; is a a form of the possessive case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; used as a predicate adjective (e.g., &#8220;The green handbag is hers.&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, &#8220;her&#8217;s&#8221; is a nonsense word.<\/p>\n<p>The woman who wrote the real-estate ad meant to say that the walk-in closet was suitable for a man <em>and<\/em> a woman simultaneously, and she could have used &#8220;her&#8221; or &#8220;hers&#8221;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Using &#8220;HIS-&#038;-HER&#8221; would have meant that she wanted to say that the walk-in closet would be equally possessed by the man and woman.<\/li>\n<li>Using &#8220;HIS-&#038;-HERS&#8221; would have meant that she wanted to say that the walk-in closet had a &#8220;his&#8221; area <em>and<\/em> a &#8220;hers&#8221; area.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;hers&#8221; &#8212; 23,800,000 matches<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;her&#8217;s&#8221; &#8212; 1,290,000 matches<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Although some of the &#8220;hers&#8221; matches related to acronyms (e.g., for Higher Education Resource Services), this still tells me that Web authors have written the word <em>correctly<\/em> vs. <em>incorrectly<\/em> by a ratio of some 18.4:1, which is okay, but the fact that the Web contains more than one million instances of &#8220;her&#8217;s&#8221; is disappointing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Solutions:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;HIS-&#038;-HER WALK-IN CLOSET&#8221;<br \/>\nor<br \/>\n&#8220;HIS-&#038;-HERS WALK-IN CLOSET&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this yesterday in a real-estate advertisement. Problem: &#8220;HER&#8217;S&#8221; is a nonsense word. Explanation: The pronoun &#8220;her&#8221; is: the objective case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; (e.g., &#8220;Give this green handbag to her.&#8221;); the possessive case of the pronoun &#8220;she&#8221; used as an attributive adjective (e.g., &#8220;Her handbag is the green one.&#8221;); the dative case&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-possessives","category-pronouns"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;HIS &amp; HER&#039;S WALK-IN CLOSET&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/05\/his-hers-walk-in-closet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;HIS &amp; HER&#039;S WALK-IN CLOSET&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I saw this yesterday in a real-estate advertisement. 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