Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 3 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Universal Press Syndicate
An ancient story tells us of the chicken farmer who heard a disturbance one night in his hen house. "Who’s there?” he cried. “Nobody here but us chickens,” came the response.
Forget the chickens! Charge the wretch with bad pronouns. It would have spoiled the story, but the fellow should have said, “Nobody here but we chickens.”
1 sent Aileen Lorberg a handful of we’s and us's, and sought her authoritative opinion. She writes the best language column in the country, and does it for a small newspaper in Cape Girardeua, Mo. At 82, she has forgotten more about grammar than most of us will ever learn.
Advertisement from a jewelry store: “For she who loves fine crystal.” Nope. Miss Lorberg explains: The pronoun “she” is the object of the preposition “for,” so the phraae should read, “For her who loves fine crystal.” The clause “who loves fine crystal" is in apposition to “her” and is thus construed in the objective case.
This was from an editorial: “Since the agency seems to operate as if it has absolute power, it needs to be accountable to we, the taxpayers.” Nope again. It should have read, “to be accountable to us, the taxpayers.”
Columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote, “Jim and Tammy Faye both talked about we Demon Spirits a lot.” Same objection, same explanation. “Us demon spirits.”
From a feature story in the Omaha World-Herald: “But for Mom and we four small children, the bridge was the only way out of the watery nightmare. . .Mom encouraged we small girls to continue our tiring walk.” No, and again, no. Properly the sentence should have referred to “Mom and us small children,” because “Mom and us” provides an object to the preposition “for.” In an alternative parsing, Miss Lorberg says the “us” could be \ regarded as a pronominal adjective modifying children. Got that! «,
71.9%