Pronouns - Words Substituting for Words

In this section, we’ll learn about pronouns. We have seven kinds in the English language. They cause all kinds of problems, even to people in positions of power. After all, haven’t you heard someone say, “Evan and myself want to thank you for the wonderful dinner.” Well, that ain’t right. So please read on.

Back at the dawn of grammatical time, one of our ancestors got tired of grunting out sentences like this:

Igor ran quickly over to Igor’s cave and took the moose Igor had slain with Igor’s spear to Igor’s wife.

The early tribes convened an emergency session of the Grammar Committee—Miss Hamrick presiding—and promptly invented pronouns so that they could say things a bit more smoothly:

Igor ran quickly over to his cave and took the moose he had slain with his spear to his wife.

To make certain all school children could have yet another definition to memorize for English class, the Grammar Committee prescribed:

A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun.

As our discussion unfolds, we’ll see that pronouns do quite a bit more than elbow nouns out of the way. But that’s the standard definition we all learned in those gone-forever days of our youth.

 

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