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"

词汇点津：

今天的词汇大师回答了读者的来信提问。

首先是三名尼泊尔的学生问道：应该说This is she.，还是this is her.？从语法的角度上看，This is she.是正确的，但现在更常听到的是this is her.，原因很简单，当人称代词放在句尾时总是用所有格形式，所以人们习惯了用this is her.，而不是This is she.

第二个问题来自中国的读者，这位读者问短语Not until the fat lady sings.是什么意思，怎么用。fat lady暗示歌剧演唱者，因为通常做这个职业的人都不可能太苗条，这个短语是说那位歌唱家在最后压轴演出，有趣的是，与艺术无关，这个短语来自华盛顿邮报的体育专栏，说的是棒球比赛不到最后一局不能放弃。

最后，主持人讨论了两周前的一则新闻，在德克萨斯州的El Cenizo，政府确认了西班牙语为商业的官方语言。这一举动立马遭到了强烈的反对，人们认为这样会导致青少年英语水平下降，而且会造成严重的社会问题，包括贫富差距加大，矛盾激化。但有的人表示支持，因为西班牙语已经成为了他们的生活用语。