Quick question, internets!

[sofiaviolet]

Which sounds more correct?

But he was only as tall as her, and prone to slouching.

But he was only as tall as she, and prone to slouching.

I am hoping my professor was trying to correct it to "she was" and just forgot to write in half of it. "She was," btw, will be my compromise between his wtaf correction and my increasingly-acceptable original.

Comments

[thesamefire.livejournal.com]

well, look at it this way:

It sounds pretty awful to say "...as tall as I/he" alone, you REALLY need that "was". "She" sounds better alone than the other two, for some reason, which is why this is tricky.

Can I ask what the preceding sentence is?

[serpent-sky.livejournal.com]

The latter sounds correct, and is correct.

She was is an okay compromise, I guess, but the "was" isn't necessary.

[thelemic.livejournal.com]

'as her' sounds more right to me...?

[tuesdaysgone.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure door #2 is the correct grammatical structure.

[lovelypoet.livejournal.com]

I think "Her" is right as this could be the objective form of she. Just try reducing it to a simpler sentence and present tense. "He is as tall as her."

No matter what other decoration you add, you're still using him as the subject and her as the object.

Also, the comma after her is technically unnecessary as "prone to slouching" is a dependent clause relating back to "he was"

[vixalicious]

The second one is correct. But I would probably revise the entire sentence to something less wieldy, like 'They were nearly the same height, and he was prone to slouching.'

[go-gentle.livejournal.com]

In class yesterday, one of my professors informed us that in English, the default case is accusative, so in situation where case is not decided by the verbs, etc, accusative should be used. (His example was if someone says "Who wants ice cream?" the natural response is "Me" not "I".) He also claimed that places where case should be default but nominative is used are results of learned hyper-correction, influenced in part by a generation that knew Latin (where NOM is the the default case). I wasn't paying close enough attention to evaluate any of this, though, and he's not really a syntactician, only pretending to be one.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I prefer the first.