Martha Johnsen often poses questions on tricky grammar issues. Monday, on her morning radio program, she asked which of the two is correct: “He and his wife” or “Him and his wife”?

Donning my Language Cop uniform, I quickly called Martha, the morning DJ on KFUN, and explained that both are correct, depending on their function in the sentence. Though there are exceptions, pronouns that appear at the beginning of the sentence generally are in the nominative case and call for “he,” “she,” “I,” “we,” “they.”

Pronouns at the end (“him,” “her,” “me,” “us,” “them”) usually are in the objective case. But it also depends on the meaning of the sentence. Each of the following sentences demonstrates the proper case of the pronoun: “Both he and his wife are concerned”; “The search involved both him and his wife.” Continue reading →

My mommy told me a hundred million times not to exaggerate. But I continue to do so. When something is outrageously expressed, we can always say, “Well, you ought to know I was exaggerating, deliberately.”

For example, when we say, “We’ve been waiting for hours for Amtrak to arrive …“ (Well, that would be accurate.) Let’s say instead, “We’ve been waiting for hours for the Rail Runner.” That’s an exaggeration.

I received an e-mail from a reader, who forwarded a column by the humorist, Dave Barry. It’s titled “Colonoscopy,” and the writer mentions that he’s due to become the host to “a tube 17,000 feet” long. According to Barry, his doctor showed him a color diagram of the colon, “a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis.”

Slightly exaggerated, and I use the term slightly lightly, having become acquainted and re-acquainted with the procedure he describes. Continue reading →

A dozen years ago, about a dozen of us retired from Highlands University, having amassed possibly a total of 300 years of service (12 faculty times 25 years average). There must have been enough of us personas non grata to prevent us from celebrating our retirement on the university campus.

Instead, a group of fellow faculty treated us retirees to a buffet dinner and program in the basement of Immaculate Conception School. The building has since become the Father George Salazar Catholic Center. I was pleased to attend, taking my mother, who forever thought of her then-59-year-old retiring “Hijito” as a pre-teen. She beamed, as did many other parents, siblings, children and well-wishers.

When it was my turn at the mike, I thought of the damage my brother Severino and I might have caused during our 12-year tenure at I.C., w-a-y back in the ‘50s. I remarked that I was amazed the building had remained intact. But in reality, I plied much of my discourse with hyperbole. Continue reading →

Possibly the most confusing and complicated verb form in the English language is, paradoxically, also about the shortest: to be.

In many languages — not just in English — the different forms of the word seem to defy logic. You start with “be,” but you can’t change the tense of it by saying or writing “beed”; no, instead many forms of the word branch out: am, was, were, been, being. To most English speakers, the various permutations come naturally, but in other languages, such as Spanish, the issue seems much more difficult.

Take for example the first words one learns when picking up a different language, that is, words other than the curse words, which apparently we always learn early. The Spanish verb forms are “ser” and “estar,” both meaning “to be,” but that’s just the beginning.

Spanish learners often struggle with “ser” and “estar” because they need to decide quickly whether they’re referring to a condition or an essential quality. Continue reading →

It’s just my luck to have been raised in a family where appearance might not have been paramount, but it was nevertheless w-a-y ahead of whatever was in second place.

My mother, the late Marie Trujillo, would have been scandalized had we little Trujillos done anything to bring dishonor to the family. A devout Catholic, Mom probably added a couple of beads to the rosary she carried, something that ponders, “Que dira la gente?”

To Mom, who passed away in 2002, her constant concern was “what people might say.” It was a breach of etiquette to leave the house with my shirt half tucked in, half sticking out. The first time I heard the word “shayote,” I almost took it as an as-yet-undisclosed given name. Seeing me heading for school, she occasionally uttered and muttered, “There goes shayote.” Continue reading →

If you say it softly, it’s not so bad. Now what’s that supposed to mean?

Well, it’s a conclusion I’ve reached after years and years of observation as to how people choose to express themselves. Shouting out a word — if you overlook the possibility of rousing someone from slumber — is worse than whispering it.

Let me explain:

Some people, loath to use the f-word, or the b-word, or the s-word, or any other alphabetical sequence-word, tend to downplay it, to reduce it to a mere whisper, on the assumption that if they utter the word softly, there’s no harm, no foul. A high school classmate, upset over the grade he got in chemistry, once told me in a quite audible tone, “That teacher’s an —” He hushed the descriptive word he was about to use, and all I could hear was a barely audible word that had to have begun with a vowel, as indicated by the fact that he used “an” instead of “a.”

Continue reading →

In the past few days, I performed two highly unusual acts: I chose to gift a relative and to friend someone on Facebook. You say this is no big deal?

Let me explain:

At the school I attended three-fourths of my life ago, Immaculate Conception, in Las Vegas, our English teacher, Margaret Kennedy (after whom Highlands’ Kennedy Hall is named), drilled into us the notion that there are verbs and there are nouns.

Sounds simple enough, and we all know that many English words, such as “race,” and “dream” can be both parts of speech. You can race (verb) in a race (noun) and you can dream a dream. But what I now have trouble with is the wholesale verbing of nouns, which appears to be a partial result of the Internet generation.

The main grammatical point I make here is that we don’t meet or make friends anymore; instead, we “friend” them. And rather than giving a gift to someone, we get rid of that annoying participle and simply “gift” that person. Continue reading →

What was intended as a joyous occasion — a sign of real progress, with cake as the main course and punch as the chaser — might have instead appeared as an annoyance, if you read newspaper headlines.

Let me explain:

A recent issue of the Optic included a front-page photo spread on a ribbon-cutting for a the city’s newest diversion dam. About 50 city officials and townspeople boarded vans to go high up Gallinas Canyon, “to places some of you have never been before,” as Mayor Alfonso Ortiz expressed it.

He was right. My wife, Bonnie, and I had never seen Bradner or Peterson reservoirs. True, we’ve been by there, but the roads taken by the four intrepid city drivers were scarcely navigable by man or beast. Once we reached the summit of what might be called the “San Miguel County Nosebleed Section,” we saw wonderful, pristine sights, placid ponds, albeit a bit too dry for our tastes. Continue reading →

We’re not discussing “tacky” here, just the warm, beneficial, feel-good, even therapeutic effects of what we’ve been doing since the dawn of time: hugging.

It’s something I grew into after several decades, but now, as an admittedly and increasingly emotional senior citizen, I’ve become much more of a hugger. A nasty old man? Never, just a hugger.

But let’s back up several decades. I believe that my late mother, Marie Trujillo, began realizing the preciousness of life when her first granddaughter, Stephanie came around. The fact that Stephanie’s mother, Dorothy, and her family lived in Phoenix made travel and family sightings a bit less frequent.

So seeing Steph became a joy, each visit ending with everyone’s lament, “I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon.” Continue reading →

HANNIBAL, MO. — “Tom! No answer. Tom! No answer. What’s gone with that boy, I wonder?” Is there a person in America who can’t place that partial exchange?

It comes from the opening lines of “Tom Sawyer,” a classic of American Literature, whose author everybody remembers as Mark Twain, The Mark Twain, the one-of-a-kind storyteller, humorist, observer of American life along the Mississippi.

Twain, who lived between 1835 and 1910, was prolific, having written, among other works, “Innocents Abroad,” “Roughing It,” “The Prince and the Pauper,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Continue reading →