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Nightedge Jun 20th, 2015 08:01 am

such as he/him
 
Are they both correct?

-Opponents such as she must not be made light of.
-Opponents such as her must not be made light of.

I see nothing wrong with the second, because 'such as' is the same as 'like', a preposition, which should be followed by the objective case, her/him/them, etc. What do native speakers think?

susan53 Jun 23rd, 2015 02:29 am

Re: such as he/him
 
First of all, the use of a personal pronoun as complement of such as is very rare. A search of a 3m. word corpus brought up 513 examples of such as, of which only two had a personal pronoun as complement

a) "What mean you, my lady?" "Richard of Gloucester has never been one to allow his heart to rule his head. Such as he can not comprehend that which prompts others to give their heart free rein!

b) ...through NGOs such as you, many people in developing countries are living ...

Notice though that ...

a) the first one (which can be understood as an ellipted construction : People such as he...) is archaic in style. The use of the subject pronoun in current English would probably only happen in formal style.

b) with the second one - you - it is impossible to decide if it's intended as subject or object - the question doesn't arise as the word is identical.

In current English though, neutral or informal style would definitely opt for the object pronoun rather than the subject - and I suspect would prefer like over such as:

Opponents like her shouldn't be underestimated

sounds to me much more natural than
Opponents such as her shouldn't be underestimated

Nightedge Jun 23rd, 2015 11:32 pm

Re: such as he/him
 
Good answer. Thank you.


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