He or him??

I think he because I hear the missing yet implied verb was in my head when I read the line... but it still seems a little awkward to me. I'd probably rewrite it, making two sentences.

"As I climbed out of my car in a downtown garage in Austin, Texas, their lawyer called with the news. Telephoning from a small village in England, his voice was thinned by the distance."

MarkEsq said:

Need some help to be sure which is correct:

[FONT=&quot]Their lawyer called with the news as I climbed out of my car, his voice thinned out by the distance between us, him in a small village in England and me in a downtown garage in Austin, Texas.[/FONT]

Click to expand...

It is a restatement of the object of the preposition ?between" with added description, so "him" would be correct. But that is a rather circumloquacious way of putting it, so you might want to rewrite it.

Agree with Neptune. This is just a bad sentence and needs redone. The major problem is that it should be two sentences. Too much stuff is trying too hard to be crammed into this single one, and that leads to the pronoun confusion.

caw

Neptune for the answer.
Ironmike for the rewrite suggestion.

I've never heard a voice on the phone thinned out by the distance.

Jamesaritchie said:

I've never heard a voice on the phone thinned out by the distance.

Click to expand...

I have. Back in the pre-digital days, when signals were analog and sheep were scared, the longer a phone call had to travel, the more it was subjected to step-wise amplification. At each of those steps, a bit of the dynamic range was lost. Overseas calls that transited the cable were also dynamically time-plexed to get more calls in a given amount of bandwidth. That process chopped even more range out of the call.

The result was a distinctly washed-out sound.

Back in the 1960's I called the UK from the Caribbean regularly and had no sound problems at all.

Duncan J Macdonald said:

I have. Back in the pre-digital days, when signals were analog and sheep were scared, the longer a phone call had to travel, the more it was subjected to step-wise amplification. At each of those steps, a bit of the dynamic range was lost. Overseas calls that transited the cable were also dynamically time-plexed to get more calls in a given amount of bandwidth. That process chopped even more range out of the call.

The result was a distinctly washed-out sound.

Click to expand...

C'mon, Bufty. When you were a lad, continental drift only just started. Loch Ness and the Caribbean were the same body of water.

Yes, a mere 250,000,000 years ago northeastern corner of Scotland was about ten miles from where I am now. It seems like just yesterday. But Loch Ness was never part of the Caribbean and vice versa.

With all that other stuff settled, I wonder if the final me should be an I.

benbradley said:

With all that other stuff settled, I wonder if the final me should be an I.

Click to expand...

Wonder no more, pup. Since KM is correct about "us" and "him" being governed by "between," it naturally follows "me" is also in the objective case.

King Neptune said:

Loch Ness was never part of the Caribbean and vice versa.

Click to expand...

Was too.

benbradley said:

With all that other stuff settled, I wonder if the final me should be an I.

Click to expand...

Chase was right to write that this also should be in the objective, because it is also an object of "between".

But he is mistaken about Loch Ness having been pat of the Caribbean, mainly because the Caribbean wasn't there when Loch Ness was in that area, but we don't worry about such things.

Just yesterday, in my Geology class, i ran a video on Loch Ness (which I have visited, more than once). The loch itself is no more than 10,000 years old, an eyeblink of geologic time. The Great Glen Fault, however, in which the loch resides, is really ancient, originally a boundary between two continents. Scotland north of the fault was originally connected to proto-North America. England and southern Scotland resided far away to the south, and stuff got jammed together via plate tectonics much later, then severed again even later than that. All the big volcanic stuff so prominent on the Isle of Skye and elsewhere is the record of the splitting apart of the North Atlantic, in Cretaceous time.

There will be an exam next Friday.

caw

Though picky, when not hammered, geologists rock.

BTW, there's some of that red sandstone within sight of here, but I don't hammer either way.

"As I climbed out of my car in a downtown garage in Austin, Texas, their lawyer called with the news. Telephoning from a small village in England, his voice was thinned by the distance."

Click to expand...

I'm aware this isn't the OP, but someone agreed with this as a rewrite and since this is a grammar subforum I felt the need to point out the dangling participle. A voice does not telephone from a small village in England. A lawyer might.

/pet peeve

Their lawyer called as I climbed out of my car. His voice sounded thin and attenuated by the 13,000 miles between his village in England and my location in a garage in Austin, Texas.

The OP's second line ('he') might be the subjunctive, not that I really get the subjunctive in English.

pandaponies said:

I'm aware this isn't the OP, but someone agreed with this as a rewrite and since this is a grammar subforum I felt the need to point out the dangling participle. A voice does not telephone from a small village in England. A lawyer might.

/pet peeve

Click to expand...

Yes, the original sentence is better.