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(..) those who stand to profit from our working harder,

I've noticed this pattern very often, but I don't know how or when to use it. The following

(...) those who stand to profit from us working harder,

would be right as well, right? Is there a difference in meaning? Or in context of use maybe? Thanks in advance!

For reference, the sentence is taken from the fourth paragraph from the end in this article.

Nico
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    Context of use it is: the preference for possessive our over objective us with the gerund working, for specifying who is doing this working, is characteristic of formal register. – Brian Donovan Dec 22 '16 at 14:37
  • @BrianDonovan okay, so they mean the same but our is more formal? Thanks a lot! That's the kind of stuff they don't teach you in high school English – Nico Dec 22 '16 at 14:46

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As @BrianDonovan notes in their comment, this comes down to the context in which it is used:

"the preference for possessive our over objective us with the gerund working, for specifying who is doing this working, is characteristic of formal register."

Edwin Ashworth
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Chappo Hasn't Forgotten
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  • Isn't it site policy to convert comments to answers when one thinks that that's what they should be using Community wikis rather than as personal answers piggybacking on others' submissions? In this case, I'll be back to downvote an answer to a well-known multi-duplicate (which shouldn't be 'answered') unless this is deleted. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 01 '20 at 19:35
  • @Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Monica I downvoted on the basis that copying and pasting others' comments is a cheap way to get awards. All you need do is vote up Brian Donovan's answer. – Greybeard Mar 01 '20 at 20:11
  • @EdwinAshworth perhaps you might get down from your pulpit and consider that mine was an innocent mistake. I've been quietly cleaning up the many hundreds of unanswered low-quality questions that are over 3 years old but avoided being auto-deleted after the first 12 months because someone happened to give them a single upvote. They linger unproductively in our library. If they have one comment or less, I downvote them and they get auto-deleted within 10 days. If they have 2 comments, even a zero score isn't enough for auto-delete to work, so I VTC many of these, but I don't want to flood... – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 07:52
  • ...our review queues, so many of them I DV and leave for a later clean-up. And sometimes I find a question that seems interesting, and I upvote it and star it for me to come back to and write up a quality answer. A small number of questions had comments that constituted a reasonable answer, so on the weekend I decided to create a quick answer to a few of them. To be honest, if this is frowned upon and the answers DV'd then I will simply delete those answers and go back to my old approach, which was to eliminate most questions without attempting to rescue the better ones. To you & @Greybeard... – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 07:59
  • ...I'm prepared to put in the extra work in adding value to our library but I expect at least a small reward for the effort involved (in addition to my 20 close votes per day & other work on the review queues), so I'm not prepared to do community wikis. @Greybeard's comment about a "cheap way to get awards" is a cheap, unwarranted and unfair attack. – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 08:04
  • @Greybeard BTW, what do you mean "All you need do is vote up Brian Donovan's answer?" Note that the question was closed as a dupe after I posted my answer, so I was entirely unaware of any answer by Brian. I couldn't care less about your DV, but the suggestion that I was purely chasing rep points is unfair, unfounded, ignorant and hurtful. – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 08:10
  • @Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Monica - Imagine you give a comment that I think is, in fact a brilliant answer. My action would to be to vote up your comment and add a comment that you should promote your comment to an answer. I would find it wrong to copy your answer as my answer.It seems little different from saying "I have copied this book from Project Gutenberg - you can copy this - please send me $10." – Greybeard Mar 02 '20 at 10:18
  • If you do so much tidying of the site, one would have thought you'd CV as a (multi-)duplicate you recognise instead of adding yet another answer. // Register is involved, though it's not the whole story. The ACC-ing construction focuses more on the doer and the POSS-ing on the action, so some would ignore register and choose the emphasis they wanted. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 02 '20 at 15:26
  • //// Also, perhaps you should take up your stance with the moderator @MetaEd, who has written in a similar situation: 'Avoid copying an answer from elsewhere. “You have to write an actual answer, in your own words. A post that consists only of copied text … is not your work”.' I've flagged comments I've thought worth preserving for moderators to decide whether to convert to wikis. Takes less time than copy-and-paste. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 02 '20 at 17:02
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    @EdwinAshworth your last point ["I've flagged comments I've thought worth preserving for moderators to decide whether to convert to wikis. Takes less time than copy-and-paste"] offers an excellent way forward. Thank you. – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 22:16
  • @Greybeard that approach makes sense for new(-ish) comments. It doesn't really work for comments that are over three years old: I've tried it. This was a dead question, stuck in our library without an answer. The best option would have been to delete it, but I don't have the rep for that. The next best option would have been to CV it, but I'd used up all my CVs for the day. I should have left it for the next day & looked for a dupe; I'll know better next time. Perhaps you could spend some time down here in the EL&U wasteland clearing out old rubbish, to get an idea of what's involved... – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 22:33
  • @Greybeard ... try this filter to see the oldest unanswered questions with score of 1 and consider what you would do with each. :-) – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Mar 02 '20 at 22:35
  • @Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Monica I'm a little clearer on what you are trying to do. Flagging seems to be passing the buck – somebody will still have to do the tidying. SE's system does not allow for members who can’t delete to be as helpful as you intended to be. I also suspect that a lot of comments are taken as answers anyway or that the question has been answered elsewhere. My final point is “Does it matter that a question is unanswered?” I suspect that, if it were thought necessary, a line or two of code could be inserted to automatically delete unanswered questions after, say, one year. – Greybeard Mar 03 '20 at 10:03