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I follow a Spanish feed on Twitter for some easy practice. I came across this tweet the other day:

Nunca se me ha ocurrido matarle ni lo he pensado

I've never seen so many two letter words in a single sentence. Is it grammatically correct?

My guess is that it says Never has it occurred to me to kill him nor have I thought about it.

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Your guess is correct.

Often, we say long sentences that involve many stuff at once, like the present case.
Now, I would've prefered to see this written as:

  • Nunca se me ha ocurrido matarla(lo) ni lo he pensado,

where la and lo are the object pronouns for ella & él, respectively.

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    Le has specific use for DO's that are personal pronouns. I believe the grammar pattern you are describing is called "loísmo" .. even though it is common, it is dialect-specific. – roberto tomás Mar 2 '16 at 14:07
  • @robertotomás On the contrary. Lo/la is the "standard" form, and the one that is preferred in most Spanish speaking countries. Using le is a form of leísmo, and is pretty much restricted to Spain. Also, it's only valid if the one being killed is a man. If it's a woman, then the only correct form is la. – Yay Mar 2 '16 at 21:26
  • "Le" means "a él" in this context, hence the correct form is not the "standard" form mentioned by Yay (which is very common in Latin America).The idea of the phrase is "Nunca se me ha ocurrido matar a el" and not "…ocurrido matar el" -> in the latter case, you would use "matarlo" but in the former, it's "matarle" (yes, I know, it's a mess) – akosma Mar 3 '16 at 11:50
  • @Yay — I see now... Note the difference, between "Vio a un hombre / Lo vio " and "Le di un beso". Both are standard, and correct. Le vio would be leísmo, as from Spain. La di un beso would be Laísmo, as from México (or apparently "central" Spain). "se" in our sentence is the indirect object, and "lo" is direct. – roberto tomás Mar 3 '16 at 15:02
  • @akosma I can't agree with that. The preposition "a" in Spanish isn't a good way to know if an object is direct or indirect because direct objects are almost always introduced by "a" when it's a person. "Mató al hombre" is "lo mató" or "le mató" depending on the dialect. "Mató hombre" just doesn't make any sense. A good way to see it is to change the gender: since "le" is invariable, changing "a él" with "a ella" shouldn't make any difference. However, "le mató" to say "mató a la mujer" is clearly wrong, so le is a form of leísmo here. – Yay Mar 3 '16 at 15:22

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