Overhaulin'

Which one of the following sentences is grammatically correct?

a. Us students have a lot of work to do. b.Please return the book to us when you've read it. c. Who did you sell your old car to? d. John is a better baseball player than me.

Public Comments

1. The only correct sentence here is B. A should be We students. C should be To whom did you sell your car? D should be John is a better player than I.
2. a) should be; "We" students have a lot of work to do. b) Looks good c) To whom did you sell your old car? (technically, you're not suposed to end sentence with a preposition) d) should be: John is a better baseball player than "I"
3. I select sentence B. A: should be "We students" ... you can delete the word "students" and see that "us" is incorrect. C: ends with a preposition. Everyone talks like this in real life, but the correct grammar would be, "To whom did you sell your old car." D: again, everyone talks like this in real life, but the better form is, "John is a better baseball player than I [am]."
4. Eurgh. Is the question being marked by someone who is up-to-date on the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, or an old prescriptive toad working out of some book by Ben Franklin? I'll assume the former. a. Us students have a lot of work to do. WRONG - it should be "we students". b. Please return the book to us when you've read it. UNCERTAIN - Maybe the questioner means it to be wrong for using "us" instead of "me", but if the speaker is saying it on behalf of a family, library or any other collective ownership, then "us" is fine. c. Who did you sell your old car to? MOST LIKELY CORRECT - Presumably the expected answer is that it should be "To whom did you sell your old car?" - but "whom" these days is getting increasingly archaic and only a creepy old dork would say it that way. "Who did you sell your old car to?" in ordinary conversational English is fine. d. John is a better baseball player than me. CORRECT "Better than I" - using the nominative form - is archaic and another creepy-old-dork construction. ==quote== Myth: Expressions like "It was me" and "She was taller than him" are incorrect; the correct forms are "It was I" and "She was taller than he." The forms with nominative pronouns sound ridiculously stuffy today. In present-day English, the copular verb takes accusative pronoun complements and so does "than." My advice would be this: If someone knocks at your door, and you say "Who's there?" and what you hear in response is "It is I," don't let them in. It's no one you want to know. - Geoff Pullum, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/4225 ==end quote==