The Missing Pronoun Gap

One telltale sign of a novice writer is when they demonstrate confusion over the most simple of grammatical rules – the agreement of pronoun and antecedent.

What could be simpler? A wordsmith of any experience shouldn’t stumble when they are called upon to ensure all pronouns agree in number, gender and case to the preceding noun to which they refer.

What’s that, you say? Something’s amiss?

In fact, there is. In the previous paragraphs, I deliberately have hoisted myself with my own petard.

More precisely, I’ve been having a bit of what passes for grammatical fun to illustrate an example of English usage that I’ll call “The Missing Pronoun Gap.”

Old-school grammarians will have winched twice in reading the first three sentences of this post. In two of those sentences, I used the plural they to refer to the singular writer and wordsmith, a clear violation of the general rule. Or is it?

What to do?

Orthodoxy would argue that the corrective move is replace the errant they with a singular he or she. But which one? The writer in question could be either male or female. Or there could be a compelling reason to cloak the gender of said writer.

 Since English doesn’t have a singular third-person pronoun that can refer to either gender, what’s the responsible writer to do?

Once upon a time, the proscriptive course would have been to use he in cases where gender is not stipulated. Not anymore. Modern sensibilities – tempered and forged by the women’s movement and a growing general enlightenment – forbid it.

“That this practice has come under increasing attack has caused the single most difficult problem in the realm of sexist language,” says Bryan Garner in his Garner’s Modern American Usage. “Other snarls are far more readily solvable.”

Use of they or their as singular pronouns often come in sentences with such indefinite pronouns as someone, everyone or anyone. All are commonly mistaken as plural constructions.

For example:

Everyone knows how to mow their own grass, but anyone with a lick of sense will pay to have it done.

Everyone is singular, but many (most?) folks believe it’s plural so the use of their sounds correct.  The problem is everyone doesn’t specify gender. In fact, it literally means all of us: women and men. So it should be his. Or her. But which one?

Keep reading as I try to disperse the fog a bit.

The dilemma

Traditional grammarians, even as they express their distaste for the use of they as singular pronouns, acknowledge the dilemma.

“Our system of personal pronouns – or, to be more accurate, a gap in the system – is the source of a great deal of the sexism in our language,” admit Martha Kolln and Robert Funk in their Understanding English Grammar.

In spoken English, the problem already has been resolved by the common use of they, their or them as substitutes for the missing third-person, non-gender pronoun.

For example:

Teaching a child their ABCs is essential if they are to succeed in kindergarten.

The writer who ignores grammar will find they don’t have many readers.

Garner argues that the language should yield to the inevitable.

 “Speakers of American English resist this development more than speakers of British English, in which the indeterminate they is already more or less standard,” he says. “That it sets many literate Americans’ teeth on edge is an unfortunate obstacle to what promises to be the ultimate solution to the problem.”

Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer demurs, describing himself as “too old a dog to embrace” they as a singular pronoun. But he notes that “in speech most of us use the singular ‘they’ relentlessly and without a second thought.”

Hardliners, of course, consider the practice as yet another sign of civilization’s slide into anarchy and madness.

“In colloquial usage the inconvenience of having no common-sex personal pronoun in the singular has proved stronger than respect for the grammarians,” bemoaned the great Henry W. Fowler in his landmark A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

Examine the possibilities

Theodore Bernstein, another traditionalist, grudgingly admitted that the use of they in such cases “is common enough in spontaneous, casual speech, and even occurs occasionally in the work of reputable writers.

“Yet,” he adds, and you can imagine him raising his index finger emphatically, “the writer of craftsmanship and taste” – dramatic pause – “will reject the grammatical inconsistency of the combination of a singular noun and a plural pronoun. He will examine the possibilities available.”

I count myself among the grammatical pragmatists who believe that the use of they as a singular pronoun is an imperfect, but acceptable, option in sentences where the gender of the preceding noun isn’t identified.

Most often, however, I find myself looking for a way, as Garner puts it, “to write around the problem.” In my mind, it’s better to spend more time building a better sentence than to be considered by some of my readers as a careless, slovenly writer.

Some alternatives

Perhaps like me you seek alternatives to the “anything goes” landscape in which the singular they thrives. If so, here are some options listed from worst to better.

n  Alternate the use of he and she throughout the article or passage. This deranged attempt at fairness – or at least parity – is confusing and disorienting to readers. Avoid it as you would a pit bull who just gnawed its way out of the backyard.

n  Try to please everyone. Use the phrase he or she, his or her to refer back to a non-gender-specific singular noun.

For example:

It’s not hard to imagine a teacher who hates his or her students but loves having summers off.

Who could blame a manager, when faced with downsizing his or her department, for wanting to run away and join the circus?

Although perfectly acceptable from a grammatical or political point of view, this usage amounts to writerly cowardice of the worse sort. It’s a clunky alternative that interrupts the flow and rhythm of the sentence and labels you a writer without conviction and spirit. You’ll hate yourself if you resort to it.

Exponentially worse is the typographical atrocity s/he or h/she. Mercifully, I’ve never actually seen this literary construction used, but a couple of reference books I consulted present it as a possible alternative. I’ve since burned them. (Kidding!)

n  Embrace the past and damn the torpedoes! Use he or him as non-gender singular third-person stand ins. After all, mankind is used widely to refer to all of us, male and female, although humankind is coming on strong. You’ll delight the traditionalists, who see themselves as the lone Gandalf, standing staff in hand and roaring, “You shall not pass!” Don’t be shocked, however, if you infuriate everyone else – and not just women – who will accuse you of being a lazy Neanderthal. Not me, you understand, just all of them.

n  Make the preceding noun plural. This is easily done, in most cases with little or no fuss. You then can employ the useful they or them, and no one can dare complain.

n  Rewrite the damned sentence! This, of course, is by far the best option. Yes, it requires more work, but sometimes the best approach to a problem is to avoid it altogether. And when you do, you discover the result often is better than the original.

While the venerable AP Stylebook says use of they/their/them as singular and/or nongender pronouns is acceptable, it clearly views the usage with distaste.

“Rewording usually is possible and always is preferable,” AP says. “Clarity is a top priority; gender-neutral use of a singular they is unfamiliar to many readers.”

Bernstein concurs, “The solution here is to recognize the imperfection of language and modify the wording.”

Try these modifications, which cause little or no disruption to the original sentence.

·       Delete the pronoun completely.

Original: The professor rushed out of the classroom as soon as confirmation of the $25 million inheritance was delivered to him by singing telegram.

Revised: The professor rushed out of the classroom as soon as confirmation of the $5 million NIH grant was delivered by singing telegram.

·       Change the pronoun to a or the.

Original: The professor rushed out of the classroom as soon as confirmation of his $5 million NIH grant was delivered by singing telegram.

Revised: The professor rushed out of the classroom as soon as confirmation of the $5 million NIH grant was delivered by singing telegram.

·       When the noun is included in an introductory prepositional phrase starting with “if,” rewrite the sentence using the relative pronoun who.

Original:  If a firefighter is afraid of fire, perhaps he should choose another line of work.

Revised: Perhaps a firefighter who is afraid of fire should choose another line of work.

·       Repeat the noun instead of using a pronoun, but only if there are enough words separating the two to avoid repetitiveness. 

Original: A writer must know the basics of grammar before embarking on any major writing project. If he doesn’t, the project will be compromised.

Revised: A writer must know the basics of grammar before embarking on any major writing project. If the writer doesn’t, the project will be compromised.

Never: A writer must know the basics of grammar before the writer embarks on any major project. (Beep, beep! Proximity alert!)

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is sanguine about the rising popularity of they as a single pronoun, pointing out that the problem is not a 20^th century development.

“Although the lack of a common-gender third person pronoun has received much attention in recent years from those concerned with women’s issues, the problem, as felt by writers, is much older; the plural pronouns have been pressed into use to supply the missing form since Middle English,” it says.

 Merriam-Webster also helpfully reminds us that “the English pronoun system is not fixed.” For instance, thou, thee and ye all have been supplanted by the ubiquitous you.

 “They, their, them have been used continuously in singular reference for about six centuries, and have been disparaged in such use for about two centuries,” it says. “Now the influence of social forces is making their use even more attractive.”

So the general consensus is that the use of they will grow ever more accepted as a singular alternative to the chauvinist he when referring to preceding singular nouns of undetermined gender.

The ever-practical Dreyer says that day already has arrived.

“The singular ‘they’ is not the wave of the future; it’s the wave of the present,” he says.

A final thought

Before we leave the subject of pronouns and gender, let’s touch on the issue of how to deal with what AP calls “gender-nonconforming individuals” – that is, those who do not fit into the traditional view of two genders.

Such individuals could be transgender (those whose gender identity does not match the sex or gender they were identified as having at birth), intersex (those with genitalia, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit typical definitions for males or females at birth), nonbinary (those whose gender identity is something other than strictly male or female) or something else.

How should the responsible writer deal with the relatively rare occasions when such concerns arise?

The answer isn’t to stick their heads in the sand and hope the whole thing goes away. Because it won’t. In fact, I suspect it will become ever more common as time goes by.

The sensible course is to determine, when feasible, the pronoun preference of the people you’re writing about and follow it. In the rarest of instances, you may encounter folks who don’t want to be identified by gender-specific pronouns at all. In those cases, you can rely on some of the suggestions offered above.

I’m less sanguine about the use of alternative pronouns invented for those people who do not identify as either male or female. One of the more common constructs is ze/zir, but there are many others and the number is growing. At some point, presumably, there will be an attempt to settle on one system for universal adoption.

I dislike these alternatives, not out of any political or grammatical convictions, but for the practical reason that most readers aren’t familiar with them. Our job is provide clarity, not spew confusion so we should find a way to write around the problem.

If you can’t, or if your subjects insist on their use, then you have no choice but to include an explanation of what you’re doing, despite its clunky and disruptive impact.

The lesson here? Language usage evolves, as does the social and cultural environment in which it exists. As writers, we have no choice but to evolve with it.

The postponed preposition

Mrs. James, my uncompromising 7^th grade English teacher, had strong feelings about what she called, with a dismissive sniff, “dangling prepositions.”

“Never, ever, end a sentence with a preposition,” she declared firmly, glaring at us fiercely through her black, cat-eye rimmed glasses. “It’s the sign of a lazy, ignorant writer.”

Her upper lip curled upward in utter contempt as she delivered her decree – as irrefutable and final as Holy Scripture.

Mrs. James was Old School. When it came to grammar, rules were rules. There was no such thing as a difference of opinion. Individual choice didn’t exist. Writerly preferences must bend the knee, always, to The Rules.

She rejected the idea, widely accepted these days, that sentences ending with a preposition are a natural way of talking and – in many cases – a natural way of writing, too.

In fact, avoiding terminal prepositions has never been a rule chiseled in stone, as Mrs. James suggested. Grammarians have wrangled for 300 years about the permissibility of such constructions.

The dispute started, as these things so often do, when playwright-poet John Dryden, a self-declared grammar expert, penned an essay in 1672. He argued that the English used by his generation of writers was superior to that of its predecessors – a group that included the then-not-so-revered Shakespeare.

In that screed, Dryden first declared the evil of sentence-ending prepositions, generously acknowledging he, too, had been guilty of the crime. He then proceeded to revise all his earlier works to eliminate the hell-bound construction, a dramatic move that only served to inject an elevated degree of awkwardness into his writing.

Greater elegance?

It’s unclear how Dryden developed his distaste for what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls the “postponed preposition.”

“But Latin is probably involved,” Merriam-Webster says. “The construction does not exist in Latin, and Dryden claimed to have composed some of his pieces in Latin and then translated them into English – apparently for greater elegance or propriety of expression.”

 Until Dryden poked his nose in, terminal prepositions weren’t an issue, says Merriam-Webster. They were, in fact, a regular feature of Old English.

“No feature of the language can be more firmly rooted than if it survives from Old English,” it notes wryly. (I don’t like the “than if” construction much, but we’ll leave that for another day.)

Winston Churchill, another renowned English writer, is famously associated with the dispute over terminal prepositions.

When an editor clumsily rewrote one of his sentences to eliminate an end preposition, Churchill, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, replied in a note, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

 It’s a great story, widely circulated, and has been used by terminal-preposition fans to end arguments for years. Unfortunately, it’s probably a fable. Scholars have failed to link the tale firmly to Churchill.

No less an authority than Henry W. Fowler, whose masterpiece A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was first published in 1926, dismissed the rule against dangling prepositions as a “cherished superstition.”

 And yet the battle still rages.

Writers who use the end preposition often are scolded for their temerity by readers who scrutinize newspapers, magazine articles and books for offenders. Grammatical purists, successors to the formidable Mrs. James, are out there, ever vigilant for miscreants who defile the hallowed tenets they were taught as children.

“Every time we try to dispose of the foolish superstition, we receive a barrage of letters crying, ‘Outrage!’” admits Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage’s William and Mary Morris.

In my own writing, I’ve followed the advice of editors who accept there are no legitimate rules against the use of terminal prepositions, but who caution that such constructions should be used with care.

“Ending a sentence with a preposition … isn’t always such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man’s unhappy micturition,” says editor Benjamin Dreyer in Dreyer’s English.

Theodore Bernstein, late copy chief of The New York Times, agrees.

“It is well to consider that a sentence ending with a preposition is sometimes clumsy, often weak,” he declares in The Careful Writer.

With such warnings in mind, here are four circumstances that cover, in my opinion, most of the times when ending a sentence with a preposition is justified – and may damned well be imperative.

Let’s take them in order of ascending importance (as judged by me).

No. 4 – When the end preposition is part of a phrasal verb. That is, when a preposition and a verb come together to suggest an action different that the one suggested by the verb alone.

For example:

This brand of whiskey is more potent than the one I usually come across.

On such a fine spring day, the tedious Tobias is not the kind of person I wished to run into.

Both come across (the equivalent in this context of taste or buy) and run into (meet or encounter) function as phrasal verbs with very different meaning than the verbs come and run standing alone. Consider the result when you contort the sentence to eliminate the dangling preposition:

This brand of whiskey is more potent than the one across which I usually come. (Good lord!)

On such a fine spring day, the tedious Tobias is not the kind of person into which I wished to run.

No. 3 – When the sentence is an idiomatic expression. If a sentence or phrase ending in a preposition has passed into the common vernacular, messing with it is asking for trouble. Bernstein offers a few examples:

It’s nothing to sneeze at.

Something to guard against.

You don’t know what I’ve been through.

No. 2 – When the verb it precedes is weak and the preposition itself provides the necessary ending punch.

When I started the garden, I didn’t know the work I was getting into.

I ran into a friend the other day, and I asked him, “Alfie, what’s it all about?”

No. 1 – When the sentence just reads better that way. Far and away, this is the strongest reason to use the terminal preposition.

Final sputter

“If by trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, you have seemed to twist words out of their normal order and have created a pompous-sounding locution, abandon the effort,” Bernstein advises.

“Indeed, there is no reason to make the effort at all, unless the sentence sounds like the final sputter the engine has come to. Like that one.”

Dreyer, who earlier advised caution in using postponed prepositions, considers a total ban on the device one of his Big 3 Great Nonrules of the English Language. (The others are Never Begin a Sentence with “And” or “But” and Never Split an Infinitive.)

 “To tie a sentence into a strangling knot to avoid a prepositional conclusion is unhelpful and unnatural, and it’s something no good writer should attempt and no eager reader should have to contend with. If you follow me.”

Mrs. James no doubt would be uncomfortable with the slippery nature of our conversation about whether a preposition can properly serve as a sentence’s caboose. She believed in absolutes. Terminal prepositions either were allowed or they weren’t. To proceed otherwise was to invite chaos, both in writing – and in thinking.

 I sat in her class and diagrammed sentences in the mid-1960s, a time of turmoil, change and rancor. Perhaps she thought the young minds in her charge weren’t ready for the uncertainties of grammar or of life. I suspect she believed a disciplined, unambiguous approach was necessary for our development as good citizens. Regardless, she left us all to unravel the inconsistencies of language and usage on our own.

But if learning is hard, and it damned sure is, unlearning is even harder. You know?

Book critic Peter S. Prescott had someone like Mrs. James in mind, I suspect, when he defended end prepositions to Harper’s Morrises.

“Teachers don’t generally try to write,” he said, “but anyone who does knows that occasionally sentences will be ruined if terminal prepositions are forcibly bused to another neighborhood.”

Sportswriter and author Heywood Hale Broun sums it up nicely. “The object, after all, of purity is clarity and grace.”

That, brothers and sisters, is a thought up with which I WILL put.

Due to circumstances beyond our control

It’s been almost 50 years, but the sound still is sharp and clear – a distinctive SNAP! shooting across the room as C.E. Shuford opened the pages of the North Texas Daily to begin the weekly Slash session for student editors.

Shuford’s theatrical beginning to the UNT faculty’s weekly critique of the student newspaper always sent a shiver down the spines of Daily staff members as we huddled at the far end of the classroom and waited for the beatings to commence.

Slash sessions were aptly named. Faculty members were merciless in their criticism and sparing in their praise, using the mandatory gatherings as a teaching tool, certainly, but also as an opportunity to put a cap on the soaring egos of their young charges – to demonstrate that we weren’t quite as smart as we thought we were.

Keith Shelton, a hard-bitten political reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in a previous life, concentrated on reporting shortcomings. Junetta Davis, a pioneering woman journalist who had excelled in a male-dominated Associated Press before turning to teaching, drilled us for copy-editing mistakes. Smitty Kiker, a genial man with an easy laugh and a sharp bullshit detector, made occasional appearances to scold the photographers.

Fierce as a tiger

Then there was Shuford, known by generations of J-students as “Papa” and the epitome of the gracious Southern gentleman. But in the classroom and during Slash, he was fierce as a snarling tiger and an uncompromising champion of good grammar and clear, uncluttered writing.

We respected – and feared – him the most. When I was a senior, the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists gave him an engraved meat cleaver. No man deserved it more.

At least once during every Slash, and sometimes more, Shuford would sniff disgustedly, “Faulty due to in this story” or “Faulty due to here AND here.”

Once, he dismissively thrust an entire sports page aside, grumbling irately, “Faulty due tos – everywhere.”

I endured this avalanche of “faulty due tos” for several weeks before my curiosity got the best of me. I was afraid to approach the sainted Shuford, so I sought out Shelton, who was the Daily’s faculty adviser.

“Mr. Shelton,” I asked, “what in the hell is a ‘faulty due to?’ Mr. Shuford talks about them all the time.”

“Beats me,” he said with a grin. “Let me see if I can find out.”

Sensible advice

A couple of days later, he called me over.

“As best as I can tell, it’s OK to use due to as an adjective, but you should never use it as a preposition,” he said.

“Huh?” I replied eloquently. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I,” Shelton admitted with a shrug. “My advice is that whenever you feel compelled to use due to, use because of instead. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a ‘faulty because of.’”

Keith Shelton’s sensible advice no doubt would be viewed dimly by grammar’s high priesthood. But it has stood me in good stead for my entire career. As far as I know, I haven’t committed a “faulty due to” in several decades. Or allowed writers I edit to do so.

This is the Grammar Goat blog, however, so an expedition to unravel the mysteries of the “faulty due to” seems in order.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage sums things up rather well.

“The basic argument is this: Due to is all right when it clearly has a noun or pronoun to modify or when it follows a linking verb,” it says.

For example:

The candidate’s landslide win was due to a superior get-out-the-vote campaign.

My fat belly is due to a fondness for chocolate donuts.

By contrast, because of is correct when there is no linking verb.

For example:

The candidate’s landslide was achieved because of a superior get-out-the-vote campaign.

My belly has ballooned because of a fondness for chocolate donuts.

“However,” notes Edward D. Johnson in The Handbook of Good English, “because of rather than due to is preferred with a verb in expletive constructions.” That is, when it or there represent a subject or object referred to later in the sentence.

For example:

It was because of a superior get-out-the-vote campaign that the candidate won by a landslide.

It was because of my fondness for chocolate donuts that my belly ballooned.

Technically wrong

Due to is commonly used without a verb, Johnson says, particularly when it begins a sentence. Technically, it’s wrong, but acceptance of that usage is growing. (More on this later.)

For example:

Due to my love of chocolate donuts, my belly has ballooned.

Due to a superior get-out-the-vote campaign, the candidate won by a landslide.

Many modern grammarians are tired of the centuries-old dispute over how and when due to should be used. They urge an end to the bickering, a position Shuford no doubt would have considered cowardice in the face of the enemy.

“There has never been a grammatical ground for objection (to the use of due to), although the objection formulated in the early part of this century persists in the minds of some usage commentators,” Merriam-Webster says.

The objection referred to by Merriam-Webster is the use of due to as a preposition.

For example:

Wrong The handsome bachelor raised the suspicions of his neighbors due to his irregular nocturnal habits.

Correct The handsome bachelor raised the suspicions of his neighbors because of his irregular nocturnal habits.

Wrong I hate Brussels sprouts due to the fact they smell like farts.

Correct I hate Brussels sprouts because they smell like farts.

(Sometimes recasting the sentence avoids the problem altogether and provides a better result. This is true of many grammatical dilemmas. When in doubt, rewrite!)

No solid reason

Merriam-Webster, in a definitive judgment that must have Papa Shuford rolling in his grave, states flatly, “There is no solid reason to avoid using due to.”

Theodore Bernstein admits in The Careful Writer that objections to due to are fading and predicts they eventually will disappear altogether. For the time being, however, he urges caution.

“The careful writer, who does not wish to be suspected of negligence, will in the meanwhile use because of, which has a less casual flavor and is above suspicion grammatically,” he said. “… Due to in the sense of because of still has not made the grade, though it will.”

I’ll only add this, with a tip of the hat to my mentor, Keith Shelton. In each of the examples above where due to is used correctly, because of works equally well.

I’ll stick to what works. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

For whom the relative pronoun tolls

One day many years ago, I had my nose buried in an English usage text when I came across a passage that made my heart leap.

As a junior faculty member at the University of Missouri, I was desperately seeking ways to insert some rudimentary knowledge of grammar into my copy-editing students.

Their brains were empty, poor dears, vacuum-packed wastelands when it came to any notion of grammar, and they hated with the fire of a thousand suns my attempts to fill the void.

They had come to Missouri to learn to be reporters, for Chrissakes, the next generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins, not to endure lectures about pronoun-antecedent agreement and when to use “that” or “which.”

First and best editors

They sat sullen-faced as I distributed my homemade study sheets and responded with stony silence to my mantra, “All writers must be their first and best editors, and you can’t be a good editor without knowing grammar!”

That’s how I came to be spending a perfectly splendid Midwest autumn afternoon immersed in a scholarly explanation of the proper use of the relative pronouns who and whom.

Until my appointment as a journalism instructor at Missouri, I had never given much thought to the matter. My own formal knowledge of the grammar rules governing who and whom – or any grammar point, really – was as paltry as that of my students.

In my own writing, I had used the “ear test” to determine which pronoun to use in any particular circumstance, a procedure about as reliable as foretelling the affection of your significant other by plucking petals off a daisy. Even so, my choices had rarely been challenged by editors so I figured my instincts were fairly solid on the subject.

I sensed, however, the skeptical reception this seat-of-the-pants approach to grammar would receive from my students. That and a sincere devotion to the craft of writing prompted me to explore the doctrine of the grammar priesthood on the matter of who vs. whom and the parallel constructions whoever and whomever.

Universal confusion

To my surprise and relief, I found that confusion over the right usage is damned near universal and misuse so pervasive that there have been significant sentiments for more than 150 years to ban the cursed whom entirely.

On the face of it, the rules seem simple enough. Who is the nominative case and whom is the objective.

To use a well-known example, John Donne’s immortal “ask not for whom the bell tolls…” is correct because whom is the object of the preposition from. The rule states that the relative pronoun following a preposition is always objective, except when it’s not. (More on that later.)

Some other examples:

Who deserves the ice cream?

(Who is the subject so it takes the nominative case.)

To whom should I give the ice cream?

(As above, the word following a preposition takes the objective [most of the time], so whom is correct.)

I can’t imagine anyone who loves writing would ever be bored by grammar.

(Who is the subject (nominative) of the clause who loves writing.)

Whom should I invite for dinner?

 (Whom is the object of the verb invite so the objective is correct.)

Clear as a bell, right? Well, yes, as long as the sentences are simple and direct.

Firm foundation

When they get more complex, with clauses and phrases darting this way and that, it becomes harder to determine the right usage. That’s particularly true if – like my students and me – you don’t have a firm grammatical foundation from which to operate.

Benjamin Dreyer tries to be helpful in Dreyer’s English, his delightful book on how to write with style and clarity.

“If you can remember to think of ‘who’  as the cousin of ‘I,’  ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘they’ (the thing doing the thing, a.k.a. a subject) and to think of ‘whom’ as the cousin of ‘me,’ ‘him,’ ‘her,’ and ‘them’ (the thing being done to, a.k.a. an object), you’re most of the way there,” says Dreyer, copy chief of Random House.

But nothing is ever that simple, is it?

Take the seemingly straightforward rule that whom is always used after a preposition. That’s not always the case. When the prepositional clause is the object of the sentence, the relative pronoun following the preposition could very well be the nominative who.

For example:

I shall give an A to whoever can explain the rules of grammar to me.

Any normal person, which is to say anyone blissfully unaware of the mysteries of grammar, would assume the proper usage is “to whomever can explain.” Here’s where the spider says to the unsuspecting fly, “Welcome to my web.”

In this case, the entire phrase is the object of the preposition. So the proper pronoun is who since it is the subject of the verb explain.

Want to try another one? Or should we just retreat to the nearest bar for tequila shots?

The referees in the Super Bowl differed about who caught the ball in the end zone.

Once again, at first glance, the obvious choice is whom, since it follows the preposition about and takes the objective. But in fact, the phrase who caught the ball is the true object of the preposition. Who is correct for the reason explained above.

Urge to scream

After plowing through a few pages of this kind of stuff on that fall day 35 years ago, I had to stifle the urge to scream.

That’s when I came across in one dusty tome the reluctant acknowledgement that the use of whom might be headed for the dustbin of history. It would be, I thought, a funeral with few mourners.

William and Mary Morris, authors of the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, credited the exile movement to the unending “confusion arising from the use and misuse of whom.”

“Not long ago,” they wrote, “one writer on matters linguistic seriously proposed that whom be banished from the language, presumably in large part to ease his pain at seeing it so often misused.”

 Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out that grammarians have been arguing since the mid-18^th century about the who-whom construction and whether exceptions to the rule are acceptable and under what circumstances.

 “There is a certain disparity,” it admits, “between the way who and whom are supposed to be used and the way they are actually used.”

Merriam-Webster illustrates the point with a number of passages from Shakespeare in which the world’s greatest playwright technically gets it wrong.

From Macbeth:

Macbeth: … For certain friends that are both his and mine.

Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall

Who I myself struck down.

(It should be, Whom I myself struck down. Whom receives the action of being struck down, thus the objective case.)

From King Lear:

Albany: Run, run, O, run!

Edgar: To who, my lord? Who has the office?

(To whom, object of the preposition.)

Now, if a guy whose work has lasted 400 years can’t get it right, what chance do the rest of us have? Perhaps the better question is: If a writer for the ages routinely flaunts the rule, do we mere mortals really need it?

Even the most punctilious of grammarians admit the battle already has been lost in speech, where whom rarely is used in any construction, largely because it sounds affected and phony sophisticated to most ears.

It sounds particularly out of key when it’s used, even correctly, at the beginning of a sentence.

For example:

Whom shall I invite to the party?

Whom are you going to prom with?

Neither sentence sounds right to the unerring Gunnels ear, although grammatically they are.

William Safire, who wrote a column on language for The New York Times for many years, agreed that using whom at the beginning of a sentence “comes across as an affectation.”

“What is comfortable to the listener’s ear is to be preferred in address,” he wrote.

 Wiggle room

Theodore Bernstein, former copy chief of The Times, a stout defender of the who-whom distinction in writing, also is willing to give the speaker some wiggle room.

“It is understandable, therefore, that the spontaneous speaker, unable to take the time for the analysis, will occasionally err,” he wrote in The Careful Writer.

How long can the stubborn whom hang on in written English?

“Our files show,” Merriam-Webster said, “that objective whom is in no danger of extinction, at least in writing.”

 Dreyer agrees. “The reports of the imminent death of the word “whom” … are greatly exaggerated,” he said, “so you’d do well to learn to wield it correctly or, at least and perhaps more important, learn not to wield it incorrectly.”

Alas and alack. There you have it.

Faced with the ambiguity my research into the who-whom conundrum had unearthed, I proceeded with my grammar lecture to my Mizzou J-students. They received my hard-won knowledge with typical insouciance.

Today, I continue to observe the distinction, dutifully correcting misuse in the copy I edit and observing the rules as best I can in my own. Until the grammar gods decree otherwise, I’m stuck, as a professional, with a difficult rule to obey, but a rule nonetheless.

Commas – the writer’s workhorses

Behold the glory – and the enduring frustration – of genius. Here is the opening line of William Faulkner’s novel, “Absalom, Absalom,” considered by some critics to be the best novel ever written about the American South.

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

It was on the strength of “Absalom, Absalom” and the more well-known “The Sound and the Fury” that Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Novel Prize for Literature.

Generations of high school students have struggled to master his dense, clause-choked, idiosyncratic prose, his unhinged characters and his bleak assessment of the human condition.

What to avoid

When I first started teaching journalism writing and reporting, I used the passage above as an example of what to avoid. Although it paints a vivid picture of the scene, it requires fierce concentration and rigid discipline to absorb the author’s description and give it meaning.

In short, it has a comma problem. “Absalom, Absalom” opens with a 122-word sentence containing one lonely comma.

True, it also has a single dash and a parenthetical phrase that help the befuddled reader navigate the treacherous literary landscape. But a hatful of commas would have helped reader comprehension even more. So would a period or two.

Faulkner being Faulkner, however, we are plunged into the sentence to fend for ourselves without commas to foster understanding and deliver clarity. And the miserly Faulkner didn’t stop there. He also banned the apostrophe in “o’clock.” (Admit it, you thought I made a typo, didn’t you? Didn’t you?)

Raisins in a cookie

Me, I love commas. I spread them liberally in my writing, like raisins in an oatmeal cookie. They are the workhorses of good writing, serving as traffic signs to control pace and tempo, and as guide rails to keep the reader on board and engaged.

Some writers jealously hoard commas as if they were gold ingots, only parting with them under extreme duress. Others apparently believe a passage sparse in commas and other helpful punctuation aids displays a lofty disregard for literary conventions and signals a creative free spirit.

Whatever. I figure, rightly or wrongly, that if you've got ’em, use ’em.

Many of the rules for comma usage are straight-forward and direct. Others, less so.

For instance, some writers I’ve edited over the years struggle with how to deal with appositive clauses, prepositional or otherwise.

Mrs. James told those of us in her seventh grade English class that introductory prepositional phrases of five words or more must be followed by a comma. It was a hard and fast rule. Five words – or more. Mrs. James was no ditherer. Free will didn’t amount to a bucket of spit in her domain.

It was only later that I learned – after being buffeted by the wild winds of daily journalism – that the minimum word count needed to trigger a comma alert was something best left to the writer’s discretion – and to the needs of the particular sentence.

But who are we kidding? Almost all introductory clauses, no matter the length, read better followed by a comma.

For example:

At first light, the British garrison at Rorke’s Drift saw the massing Zulu army arrayed across the veldt.

In truth, a bird in the hand is best left to join its feathered companion in the bush, lest it poop on said hand.

A brief detour

The same principle applies to prepositional phrases – or any type of appositive clause – that occurs in the middle of a sentence. Because of the disruptive power of such interruptions to the flow of the sentence, commas are useful in announcing to readers that they’re being taken on a brief detour before they can continue their trip to the next period.

The job of the writer is to make sure the detour (a) is worth the delay (b) provides compelling information and (c) doesn’t take too long.

My personal comma conundrum is trying to remember whether restrictive or nonrestrictive words and phrases should be set off by commas. Or to recall what the hell the difference is between restrictive and nonrestrictive or, depending on the grammar text you prefer, essential and nonessential.

If memory serves, commas precede and follow nonrestrictive elements, the sort of parenthetical information that isn’t necessary to the meaning of the noun they modify. Or it is restrictive words and phrases that need commas? No, I just checked. Nonrestrictive – commas. Restrictive – no commas. Perhaps I should tattoo that on my wrist.

Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, dubs the commas in nonrestrictive cases “only” commas.

In his brilliant book, “Dreyer’s English,” he explains thusly: “‘Only’ commas…are used to set off nouns that are, indeed, the only one of their kind in the vicinity.”

For example:

My dog, Bob, barks every time he hears a gnat fart in the front yard. (I have only one dog, the fictional Bob, so his name isn’t essential to identifying the source of my frustration. Commas are required.)

My dog Bob barks every time he hears a gnat fart in the front yard. (OK, I admit it. I like to write the word fart. But my point is that in this case, I have a pack of hounds, and only the aurally astute Bob barks at insects with digestive issues. So no commas!)

Other examples:

My son, who is very good at math, just won a scholarship to MIT. (My only son has won a scholarship. His math skills, while important to MIT, are nonessential information in identifying who won the scholarship.)

My son who is very good at math just won a scholarship to MIT. (Of my two sons, one is a math whiz who’s going to MIT.)

Here’s where it can get tricky. Let’s take the following sentence:

Jill and husband Jack concocted a wildly improbable tale about going up a hill to “fetch a pail of water.”

Provide nuance

Let’s leave aside my provocative use of quotation marks to suggest Jill and Jack had impure motives for cresting that dang hill. Notice instead that I didn’t put commas around Jack, even though we can assume that the racy Jill only has one husband.

 Why not? Because in this case, “husband” is a label, a title if you will, that I have assigned to Jack. Just as we wouldn’t write, Jill and coach, Jack, concocted…, we don’t encase Jack in commas in the original sentence. If we place a “her” in front of “husband,” however, it’s a different kettle of fish entirely.

Commas often provide nuance to sentences.

The cavalry charge that occurred on the third day of the struggle determined the victor of the Battle of Gettysburg. (Of all the cavalry charges at Gettysburg, the charge on the third day was decisive.)

The cavalry charge, which occurred on the third day of the battle, determined the victor of the Battle of Gettysburg. (Forget the infantry battles, the cavalry charge, which just happened to occur on the third day, was decisive.)

The respective uses of relative pronouns “that” and “which” in the sentences above are worthy of note. Disregard the grammatical jabber and remember: That is never used with a comma in such constructions, and which is always used with the comma. Simple, right?  

The serial comma

I’ll end this little discourse on commas with some brief observations about the serial comma.

I first was taught to eliminate the comma before the conjunction in any series in my 11^th grade journalism class. My teacher, the venerable Erma Stewart, said it was one of the things that distinguished newspaper writing from English class essays. She might as well have been Moses delivering the 10 Commandments to the Israelites. I was 16.

Lessons learned 50 years ago are hard to break.

So I’ll continue to shun the serial comma as if it were a smallpox-tainted pillowcase. I owe that to Stewart, a formidable woman who insisted her students address her only by her last name.

If you, however, wish to follow the herd and embrace the unnecessary and wasteful serial comma, I cannot stop you. When the hordes are at the gates, we must pick our battles carefully.

I realize sadly that with the death of newspapers, the triumph of the serial comma is all but inevitable. We keepers of the flame must now steal quietly into the hills and wait for better days.

A final word about Faulkner’s interminable beginning to “Absalom, Absalom.”

Several years after I started using it as an example of what not to do, I sat down and re-read the passage in preparation for the next day’s lecture. Suddenly, I was reading it with new eyes.

Where I once had seen turgid prose, I now saw elegant word play and graceful pacing. Where once I had struggled to comprehend, I now glided from word to word, phrase to phrase, glorying in the beauty of the writing and the efficacy of the scene it painted.

The lecture I presented the next day was much different from the ones I had delivered previously about “Absalom, Absalom.” That proves, I guess, that you can teach an old dog new tricks. And that only the dim and deranged refuse to keep learning. A fresh perspective is a wonderful thing, ain't it?