Question: Peter Cross, from Taylor Leibow, sent me the following email:

“My mother’s family were very concerned about using correct grammar.  Short of knowing (remembering) the rules, I use some guidelines they gave to help me.

“When people say “give it to him and I, they should simply think what it sounds like if you drop out the “him and.”  Clearly we wouldn’t say give it to I.  Likewise, we shouldn’t say “give it to him and I”.

“A trickier issue for me – There is currently an advertisement on TV that goes something like this: “You don’t drive like her, why should you pay the same insurance premiums she pays.”  My “rule” says that if you extend the sentence to say what is understood, correct use of words will become apparent.  So, the sentence becomes “You don’t drive like she drives….”  According to my rule, the advertisement should say “you don’t drive like she….”  To me that clearly sounds awkward and incorrect.  Is my rule wrong?”

Answer: This is a great question that raises all kinds of fun grammatical and stylistic controversies. First of all, the advertisement in question is “You don’t drive like her so why are you paying the same insurance premiums as her?” It’s from a commercial for Trafalgar Insurance as part of the Grey Power campaign.

There are two ways to analyze this grammatically: first, by assuming like and as are used as conjunctions, and second, by assuming like and as are used as prepositions.

Like and As as Conjunctions: If these words are conjunctions, they function by joining things that balance, such as two clauses. This means you’d need to extend the idea on both sides of the conjunction, so the sentence in question becomes “You don’t drive like her (drives), so why are you paying the same insurance premiums as her (pays)?” Clearly wrong. If these words are conjunctions, we’d instead use the subject case of the pronoun (she instead of her): You don’t drive like she (drives) so why are you paying the same insurance premiums as she (pays)? But “You don’t drive like she so why are you paying the same insurance premiums as she?” sounds wrong to our ears, even though we can see the grammatical logic.

Like and As as Prepositions: As prepositions, these words show the relationship between things. In this case, we’d choose the object case of the pronoun (her instead of she): You would say “I live beside her” or “I am like her.” By extension, “You don’t drive like her so why are you paying the same insurance premiums as her?” makes sense.

But Can Like and As Actually Be Prepositions? This is the real question and the source of the controversy. For strict traditionalists, as is a conjunction—not a preposition—and the personal pronoun that follows must be the subject of a clause, which isn’t necessarily completed. Thus “No one could be as happy as I (can be happy).” or “I can’t handle stress as well as she (can handle stress).” To most of us, this sounds odd.

Further, strict traditionalists do not consider like to be a conjunction at all, and its appropriateness is still disputed. In some circles it is considered a faux pas to use like instead of as or as if, whereas in other circles (the vast majority of circles) as sounds stilted. Read about the controversy caused by the famous jingle: Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should.

Other grammarians have argued, however, that these words often function as prepositions, not conjunctions, and have been used that way for centuries by many good writers. In a structure such as “My mother is a lot like her,” we have no trouble recognizing that like functions as a preposition and we need the object form of the pronoun after it. Such usage is now regarded as acceptable in all but the most formal writing.

So what’s right? That depends on whether you want to be understood or get good marks in a test. If your purpose is to make a grammatical point, then use she. I promise you will alienate 98% of your readers. (There I go, making up statistics again.) Using extremely formal grammar might be correct, but it isn’t necessarily right. I say use her—it’s good common usage and it’s understood by all. The thing is to know the rules, and then break them if you have a good reason. Don’t you think making an emotional connection with your audience is an excellent reason to sacrifice grammatical purity?

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