Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Trying Too Hard?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_02-2009_08_08.shtml#1249537256
From [1]the Las Vegas Sun article that [2]I quoted below:
He said he was not aware that any of the companies were already
engaged in illegal activity at the time that he helped to set up
them.
My guess: The author or the copyeditor was enforcing some (entirely
spurious) rule against splitting an idiom such as "set up," and as a
result replaced a perfectly normal construction ("set them up") with a
weird and jarring one. I wouldn't go so far as to say that "set up
them" is ungrammatical; it's as grammatical as "set up the companies"
would be. But it is surely unidiomatic, as a [3]Google Fight reveals;
a search through Google News shows an even more lopsided tally, 200:1
in favor of "set them up" rather than 20:1. I'm with [4]Horace's view
that custom is the test of good usage, and "set them up" is customary.
Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe "set up them" was just a spontaneous error.
But to me it smacks of a general [5]splitophobia, raised to a new
level.
References
1.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/aug/03/danny-tarkanian-get-150000-punitive-damages-defama/
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_02-2009_08_08.shtml#1249339694
3.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22set+up+them%22&word2=%22set+them+up%22
4. http://www.volokh.com/posts/1244585366.shtml
5.
http://open.salon.com/blog/louise_egan/2009/02/18/yes_we_can_split_auxiliaries
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