INTRO: This week our Wordmasters answer some of your questions.

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble.

RS: This is she. Or should I have said, this is her?

AA: That's a question asked by Bikash, Nirmal and Manoj — three students in Birgunj, Nepal.

RS: They e-mailed us, wanting to know which is correct: "this is her" or "this is she."

AA: It's grammatically correct to say, "This is she." So if someone asks for you on the telephone, you would answer:

RS: "This is she, this is Rosanne," although grammarian and author Pat O'Conner tells us that in common usage these days it's considered more natural to say, "This is her."

AA: We asked Pat O'Conner for the rules about using "she" and "her" in sentences.

TAPE: CUT 1 — O'CONNER

"The thing to remember about 'she' and 'her' is that 'she' does the action and 'her' is the one acted upon, as in 'she spoke to her,' 'I spoke to her,' 'he spoke to her,' 'she spoke to him' — that sort of thing. One little hint there is the object, the 'her' person, will usually come at the end of a phrase, rather than at the beginning, and the 'she' will usually come first."

RS: Chen Ying, a listener at the Hangzhou Foreign Language School in China has another question.

The letter says: "I'm puzzled by the slang [phrase] 'Not until the fat lady sings.' What does it mean and how is it used?"

AA: OK, think of a typical opera. How does the audience know when the end is near?

RS: There's a dramatic aria by the soprano.

AA: Now we don't usually think of opera singers as tending toward the skinny side.

RS: So you could say — to use the slang vernacular — "it ain't over till the fat lady sings."

No offense intended!

AA: Pat O'Conner told us that expression is often traced to a 1978 story in the Washington Post...

RS: ... written not by opera critic, but by a sports writer.

TAPE: CUT 3 — O'CONNER

"He was using it in terms of a [base] ball game, meaning you don't give up until the last inning. You don't just toss up your hands and give up a game until it's over."

AA: Patricia O'Conner is just out with a new book.

It's called "Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing."

RS: Two weeks ago, we reported on a decision in El Cenizo, Texas, to adopt Spanish as an official language for town business. But the decision to use Spanish has been widely criticized — mostly by people who don't live in El Cenizo.

AA: Doug Shannon, a computer programmer in San Antonio, Texas, saw our script on the voa.gov Web site. He says our story — in his words — "sympathized exclusively with the El Cenizo authorities."

TAPE: CUT 4 — SHANNON

"My concern is that when authorities give a disincentive to learning English, any kind of official disincentive, it's the slippery slope theory, where it's going to make children less likely to learn that language. And in a time when you have a large and growing gap between the rich and the poor, I think that any disincentive to learning the language that is being used in all sorts of high-tech engineering jobs, could just exacerbate that gap."

RS: Doug Shannon says he's not anti-Spanish — in fact, the language spoken in his home is Spanish. His wife is from Mexico.

AA: Whatever language you speak at home, we'd love to hear from you. If we read your letter on Wordmaster, we'll send you a VOA souvenir — just remember to tell us where to send it!

RS: Our e-mail address is word@voa.gov and our postal address is VOA Wordmaster, Washington, D.C., 20547 USA.

AA: With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti

MUSIC: "Return to Sender"

詞匯點津：

今天的詞匯大師回答了讀者的來信提問。

首先是三名尼泊爾的學生問道：應該說“This is she.”，還是“this is her.”？從語法的角度上看，“This is she.”是正確的，但現在更常聽到的是“this is her.”，原因很簡單，當人稱代詞放在句尾時總是用所有格形式，所以人們習慣了用“this is her.”，而不是“This is she.”

第二個問題來自中國的讀者，這位讀者問短語“Not until the fat lady sings.”是什么意思，怎么用。fat lady暗示歌劇演唱者，因為通常做這個職業的人都不可能太苗條，這個短語是說“那位歌唱家在最后壓軸演出”，有趣的是，與藝術無關，這個短語來自華盛頓郵報的體育專欄，說的是棒球比賽不到最后一局不能放棄。

最后，主持人討論了兩周前的一則新聞，在德克薩斯州的El Cenizo，政府確認了西班牙語為商業的官方語言。這一舉動立馬遭到了強烈的反對，人們認為這樣會導致青少年英語水平下降，而且會造成嚴重的社會問題，包括貧富差距加大，矛盾激化。但有的人表示支持，因為西班牙語已經成為了他們的生活用語。