by Chelsey Cooley Sat Nov 07, 2015 9:36 pm
We're using 'object pronoun' versus 'possessive pronoun' in this thread to clear up a particularly silly point of English, which is that there are actually two versions of the word 'her'. One of them just refers to a person as the object of a verb. Whenever something happens to a female person, the 'her' you use is this type of 'her'.
The swarming bats terrified her.
The other version is used when a female person possesses something. It's the same word, which is tricky, but it's technically different:
The swarming bats nested in her hair.
Weirdly enough, this is the same distinction as between the words 'him' and 'his', except that for whatever reason, we use two different words for men but the same word for women.
As for what's wrong with (A), what's referred to earlier in the thread is a 'rule' (which is fairly defunct) that states, if you have a possessive noun, it can only be the antecedent for a possessive pronoun, not for any other type of pronoun. That 'rule' (and I'm going to keep putting that in quote marks) claims that this is wrong:
Jordana's bad habits frustrated her.
and this is right:
Jordana's bad habits frustrated her parents.
Honestly, though, the GMAT itself ignores this 'rule' from time to time, and I've never seen it decide a problem.
As for eliminating A, there's also the problem where supposedly an inanimate object can't 'inspire' anything, it can only 'serve as inspiration'. I've always been a little skeptical of that, though.
