elisi | Aaaah, fandom...

Current Mood: amused

Aaaah, fandom...

Sometimes fandom throws out the wonderfullest lines. Such as this question:

You have experience decapitating with a xacto knife? ;-)

It being the latest in a growing discussion of AOQ's review of FFL.

There's also a guy (3D master) who's so anti-Spike that he's made himself a whole new theory about him, that fits with pretty much nothing of canon. *shakes head in amusement*

Also I just realised that I've yet to show off my new icon!

st_salieri found it hidden on her laptop. Isn't it brilliant? Salieri is very clever! :)

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Oh, now i'm muddled again :)

Is the sentence really: "They are not like you and I are" / "They are not like you are and I am"?

Ok, now I'm muddled. *g* If it were "They are not as you and I," I'd say that was correct, so... hmm. There's got to be a real live grammar book lying around somewhere that will settle this...

OK, I went and looked it up rather than relying on twenty-five year old memories of English class. From ENGLISH GRAMMAR: EXPLANATIONS AND EXERCISES by Mary Ansell, conveniently available on the web here:

"When a personal pronoun is used in a comparison to represent the second thing being compared, the subjective case of the pronoun should be used. The reason for this is that the pronoun is the subject of a verb, even when the verb is omitted by means of ellipsis."

So William is right after all. *g*

Heh. Awesome. William is right, but what's the betting the writers actually knew the rule?

But this is NOT CORRECT! I don't know who Mary Ansell is and I'm not entirely sure what she's trying to say (that the pronoun is in apposition to the thing it's being compared with and therefore takes the same case? This simply isn't true of English, as your own examples show). This "second pronoun in a comparison" business is wrong - we say "People like us and them don't do that sort of thing", "He isn't anything like us or them", "She's as clever as him and me". You were right in the first place - "Like you and I" is a hypercorrection, and maybe one day it'll become so widespread that it becomes correct, but at the moment it's the result of confusion.

Nonono, she's right, and this is why: I was predicating my original argument on the supposition that in a comparision such as "They are not like him and me," that "him and me" were the objects of a verb. But they aren't. "Like/notlike" and "as" are not verbs. They're comparative conjunctions linking two independent clauses, each of which contains its own subject and verb (although in the second clause, the verb is usually ellided): "They are" and "Him and me are." "Him and me" is the subject of that second independent clause, and both clauses together make up the compound subject of the sentence as a whole, and so should be "He and I are." The verb in the sentence is "to be," and there is no object.

Clear as mud?

But but but... splutter... this is ENGLISH we're talking about. Conjunctions be damned - and I'm not at all sure I buy the argument that "like" is a conjunction anyway - we say "That's me" and "I'm him!" where the subject and the object are clearly identical. And going back to your original argument - that if there is just one pronoun then it is definitely NOT in the nominative case ("I'm not like him" instead of "I'm not like he") - why would this structure suddenly change and become a "comparative conjunction" just because there are TWO pronouns?? It's the same kind of hypercorrection that gave rise to "It is I" (which I'm sure William would have committed, wannabe poet and member of the aspirant middle class that he is).

Or maybe Ansell of thinking of structures like "People like you and I hate that sort of thing" where "you and I" is indeed functioning as the subject of the sentence? Whereas in William's example "They" is the subject.

Also (and this is my clinching argument :-)) you get exactly the same kind of hypercorrection in contexts where it's clearly grammatically incorrect, such as "He gave it to you and I". The second pronoun confuses the hell out of people and they put it in the nominative because they think that's correct (who knows, maybe this is also an example of English giving up its last vestiges of case altogether).

Yup, "like" can be used as a conjunction. (Check out dictionary.com, the seventh and last definition of 'like.') And that's the sense in which it's being used in the examples we're talking about. ("Like" can be a verb, as in "He likes fish." It can also be a preposition, a noun, an adverb, or an adjective, depending upon how it's used in a sentence.)

Informal, common usage is "I'm not like him," but put that implicit verb back in there--"I'm not like him is"--and suddenly you can see how it sounds weird. It really does expand into two independent clauses, "I am" and "He is."

Your final example is indeed incorrect, but that's because in that sentence "he and I" is the indirect object of "to give."

I'm going to go look this up in some offline sources this weekend to see if the confirm it, though.

OK, I found a much more comprehensive explanation, but will have to type it in later...

I've now plowed through three usage manuals and it all seems to hinge on whether 'like' is being used as a conjunction or a preposition. If it's a conjunction, the following pronoun takes the nominative. If it's a preposition, the following pronoun takes the objective. And looking at the examples they give, I honestly can't tell the difference. To add to the confusion, the use of 'like' as a conjunction, while widespread, is frowned upon. And even if you accept it as a conjunction, several sources point out that using the objective pronoun after a conjunction is common usage and the 'correct' nominative often sounds ridiculously pedantic.

I think I'm going to give up now. Look! Cows!

Ooh, cows! Cool!

Cows! Hee! This whole discussion has been very illuminating, although I doubt I can actually remember any of it. But it just goes to show why beta readers are important!

I'm sorry I started it AGAIN and on your LJ!

But I just knew William was right!

;- )

That's what I tried to saw above in my clumsy way. "Like" works as "as".

Pedantic and affected, William was, but using correct grammar!

I think that if it's a conjonction there's an implied verb following whereas the only verb is before a "like" working as a preposition.

I knew it!!!!

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Aaaah, fandom...

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