My five-and-a-half-year-old used this word a few days ago, and I gently corrected him. We say "himself," I said, not "hisself." I'm a descriptivist when it comes to determining what is "correct"; but I want my child to learn not just any correct way of speaking, but the way that is going to best help him get ahead in life, which sometimes mean the mode of speaking that is most satisfying to self-described "purists." Plus even a descriptivist treats deviations from standard usage as errors, at least in contexts where standard usage is expected (as opposed to, for instance, when one is consciously trying to speak a particular dialect). A Google search reveals that "himself" is nearly 100 times more common than "hisself," so I'm happy to say that "himself" is the standard term and "hisself" is nonstandard.
But of course I also wanted my boy to get a sense of the patterns in the language, so I pointed out the analogies -- "herself," "themselves," "myself." Wait a minute! It's "myself," not "meself," and "ourselves," not "usselves"; the first-person reflexive uses the possessive ("my" and "our") followed by "self" or "selves." But the others use the objective ("him," "her," "them") and not the possessive.
And what is it that tells us that "myself" and "himself" are right, while "meself" and "hisself" are wrong? Not any supposed inner logic of the language, it seems to me, but simply usage: "Myself" and "himself" are standard among educated English speakers, at least outside narrow regional dialects, and "meself" and "hisself" are not. What is right to say in English is what educated English speakers say.
So when I hear prescriptivists argue using what I think of as "logical prescriptivism" -- this spelling or usage is right and that is wrong because of some inner logic of the word, or because of an analogy to other words -- I remember examples like this. Or I remember how "aren't I right?" is right and "amn't I right?" is at least extremely unusual; or how "it's" as a possessive of "it" remains nonstandard in educated edited prose, even though for non-pronouns this is exactly how possessives are formed.
To be sure, logic and analogy have their uses in language. They can sometimes be good mnemonics. They can sometimes be good guides to what will come across as confusing, or will arouse the wrong associations. They can be good guides when creating new terms, and trying to make them clear and normal-looking. But when usage conflicts with the supposed logic of the language, usage prevails. If it didn't, we'd be saying "hisself" and "myself," or "himself" and "meself."
Examples: George W. Bush, born to a wealthy New England family, affects elements of Midwestern and Texan dialect. An acquaintance of mine, who was the first person of her West Virginian family to get a college education, deliberately turns on and off Appalachian dialect depending on context. Barack Obama does something similar, using more or fewer elements of black urban vernacular, based on his audience.
Similarly, one reason to teach a child to say "himself" and not "hisself" is precisely that you want him to sound like you, and not to sound like Huckleberry Finn.
I wouldn't worry about your son. Unless he has a lot of peers who say "hisself", he'll probably settle on the standard version in his own time. Children often go through overregularization phases (where, in a sense, they make the language more "logical" than the adult version they hear around them), and something like that is probably what's happening here.
Sure, but god forbid that becomes the standard.
(Also, good to see a DFW ref. as soon as the second comment.)
If the printing centers had been in the north -- where terms like "meself" were and are more common -- our definitions of proper English might be different.
I can understand "on line" vs "in line" as a regional difference but "for sell" makes me want to punch the person who writes it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_English
I can understand your concern for your son. My seven year old son has grown up in Hong Kong, with me being his chief model for English. Many of his own constructions, though nonstandard, actually work well according to the 'rules', and have an economy and pointedness that is lost when recast in standard dialect.
It has affected me too. I am a careful speaker, and there is a range of English construction that I know to be standard. (Even as a child my speech inclined toward standard academic.) But over the years with with my wife and son, I have developed habits of English speech which, while nonstandard, no longer sound nonstandard to my ear. As a result, I must sometimes make a conscious effort if I wish to remain in the standard register!
Here are my two favorites:
Okay: He smokes but I don't.
Not Okay: He's not as happy as I'm.
Okay: Turn onto the New Jersey Turnpike.
Not Okay: Turn onto the Oak Street.
I'm not sure what's going on with me that I'm comfortable with Southern dialect (with exceptions, like 'coke' for soda), but black dialect (like 'ont' instead of 'ant') makes me cringe.
Some things you just have to be taught about language and how to use it. Apparently when I was quite young, I would say things like "Is Teh Anonymous cold?" rather than "I'm cold."
myself, ourselves
yourself, yourselves
himself*, herself?, itself?, themselves*
So of these eight, four use the possessive, two are ambiguous in spoken English, and two use the objective. No wonder kids try to regularize to "hisself".
From "Windows is Shutting Down," Clive James
http://www.clivejames.com/poetry/james/windows
I consider myself a prescriptivist and feel that most of the people who, in discussing English, call themselves descriptivists, are simply arguing that they do things a certain way and they don't wish to change.
Bob
How does it sound to others?
If correctness is determined by usage, why is the determination of what is being used limited to what is being used by "educated" English speakers? What if they are the minority of the population? If usage is primary, why are the "educated" more qualified than the the rest of the population, which may be the majority?
I reckon we all will be strugglin' on that fer a long spell.
@All:
This question was for everyone. What I meant was: Andrew hears it one way; I hear it another; I wonder how others here hear it (and whether there is variety by region.)
@Andrew:
I do not read a prescriptive approach into your mention of "correct usage" (which might be a synonym for "standard usage"), and it is not an issue that troubles me anyway. My question might be read as having been put directly to you, which would make it into a rude kind of challenge. It is that which troubles me, for I should have written it more carefully. No offense taken, I hope.
I think lots of people do this. I know I do. I lived a long time in the South, and in speaking with friends there I sometimes adopt a more southern style of speech.
I have always been delighted by certain manners of English expression by non native speakers. There is the tenancy of some Indian speakers to use 'stative' verbs in a continuous tense, even leading (perhaps?) to passive constructions.
Compare:My niece introduced me to the word 'stative' in a discussion of [5]. She is no prescriptivist, but the expression was so wrong to her ear that she hated to hear it. Should [5] and [2] be called nonstandard? Nonstandard in what sense? If 'stative' is a grammatical concept following usage, then the work 'love' is shifting its category. But if it an ontological concept, one might debate whether it simply a state. In any case, it seems that by interpreting 'love' in a certain way, it is possible for one to attempt to make a case for [5] being grammatical.
In contrast, I see no interpretative means of doing this with [4]. It seems that if [2] and [5] are grammatically incorrect (wrt standard English), then [4] must be considered incorrect in a more fatal way, as it were.
I hope this has not gone too far off topic. (It really is more of a comment for Language Log perhaps). I wonder about its implications to what I mentioned before, about my own son's English usage as well as my own. I confess IANAL (Linguist), and I don't know whether this matter, though puzzling to me, is one that warrants linguistic interest. But I would like to know what others think of the issue -- the difference in the ways [4] and [5] might be wrong.
EV, U B actin's what!
"Ant" was highfalutin' when I was growing up. "Ain't" was how us country folk pronounced "aunt". I'm not making this up.
Speaking of "ain't", if you read lit from, say 18th or early 19th century, it appeared to be used as a contraction of "am not". It really makes at least as much sense as "aren't" but at some point apparently somebody got his/her knickers in a knot about it.
"One of the functions of dialect is to mark a person as a member of a particular culture or subculture. We see this, for instance, when a politician from an elite background affects elements of lower-class dialect in order to appear to be a 'man of the people'...." You mean like this?
I certainly don't write legal documents in whatever ideolect I grew up speaking, nor do I make legal arguments or give presentations with the accent I spoke as a child. But it's not because I think that speaking that way is wrong; it's because speaking that way is *inappropriate* for the particular situation.
I think that clothing works the same way. There is nothing wrong with wearing short pants and a tee-shirt. But wearing short pants and a tee-shirt in church on Easter Sunday is often not appropriate.
The ideal is to know and customarily use standard English, but to depart periodically -- even in formal contexts -- for a creative and clever usage. Active voice, concise expression and the like are bonuses.
A worthy aspiration is to know and strive to use standard English in most settings.
For anyone, the occasional lapse with respect to common botches ("gonna," for example) or a knowing descent into context-appropriate slovenliness is a small point.
I see no reason -- other than to signal laziness or ignorance -- for the substitution of "myself" for "me" or "anxious" for "eager," for mismatches such as "we was," and the like. Careless usage tends to be part of general carelessness.
The most important points are to try to know the rules and to try to comply with them, particularly when children are involved.
I am confident that my approach contains flaws but I believe it to be effective in nearly all circumstances.
If you're in southern California, you might hear something like this (except the implied local geography and business names are fictitious). The usages are very common:
"Take the El Camino past Lake El Estero and turn at the La Brea Tar Pits. Continue until you see the La Hacienda Motel, and you'll be a block from The Bodega Market."
Why?
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." That's the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The substitution of "mine" for "my" in no way signals laziness or ignorance.
In some Caribbean Creoles, the word "mi" (pronounced "me") can mean "I," "me," or "my."
People just talk different. A Downeast Mainer or a Bostoner who omits the /r/ sound when it "should" be there and sometimes hypercorrects and adds the /r/ sound when it "shouldn't" be there is not ignorant or lazy.
Sure, people "talk different," and the differences convey meaning. For example, the athlete or politician who says "the situation invited myself to step up and perform" labels himself a pretentious goober.
Pronunciation differences -- or, as some are sure to choose, pronounciation differences -- are a different and less important issue, at least in my view.
"Educated" in these contexts is a complex little word. It does not really refer to formal schooling. Its purpose is to blunt suggestions of innate intelligence determinism ("it's an education issue, not a brain power issue") while serving as code for a host of commonly held values, such as success, power, social legitimacy, and wealth.
Who doesn't want to be associated with those things?
"Educated" English is the standard because endorsing a non-educated alternative implies that people would be aligning themselves with some sort acceptance of social failure.
Is using "mi" or "me" for "my" an unacceptable [ignorant and lazy] word choice, or is it a tolerable and less problematic pronunciation difference?
How do you know when "hisself" is a prohibited word choice, and when it's an acceptable pronunciation difference or regional difference?
Also, "mine eyes" was not just used in the Battle Hymn 150 years ago - it was used by Martin Luther King in his final speech before being assassinated. I don't think King made a poor choice, and he was and is taken seriously. Do you not take that speech or that speaker seriously because "mine" was used instead of "my"?
I think Eugene is correct - when teaching a child, it's good to teach according to usage, and even better to teach according to "educated" usage. For purposes of the child, that's the "correct" word. But for other purposes, and other contexts, anything else is not necessarily lazy and ignorant - it's just different.
There are English speakers all over China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Namibia, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, and Texas. I wouldn't call all the different word choices I've heard lazy and ignorant, just different.
I had a lifelong New Englander professor who pronounced "law" and "lawyer" the same.
I suspect that it goes back to how "thy" becomes "thine" when it's put before a word beginning with a vowel sound. We don't say "thy" anymore, of course, but it was common useage at one time. "A" becoming "an" hasn't changed. Eventually we may say "a eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth".
"Mine eyes" wasn't as strange-sounding 150 years ago, I suspect, as it is now.
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills..."
I certainly wouldn't teach a child to say "thy" instead of "your," but if some guy from Zimbabwe or Wales used it, I wouldn't call him ignorant or lazy, I would just think he must've learned some funny old timey English.
Some people still say "ye." For example, this song
from the late 1990's.
...
I think explicitly teaching an older child how to consistently and correctly use the archaic forms would be a great way to get them to think about syntax.
Then again, there is latin.
There's only one New Jersey Turnpike -- hence it gets the definite article.
There are many streets named 'Oak', so in order to use the definite article you must make the noun phrase refer to only one of them, e.g. "He lives on the Oak Street in Boston, (not the one in Quincy)".
They're not written in an ideolect that ANYONE actually speaks. Hence you shall observe that American lawyers shall use the verb "shall" more than anyone else shall have used thereof.
> "But wearing short pants and a tee-shirt in church on Easter Sunday is often not appropriate."
These dudes are atheists of Jewish background. Pick a different analogy with equivalent impact, such as "wearing a jacket over your red suspenders on Bastiat's Zeitstag".
1. Teach your children the proper rules for the language you write and speak. (In this case written and spoken English, which are not the same.)
2. Note that many of these rules are based as much on tradition as on hard-and-fast laws. This makes them no less important, but over time and in certain circumstances subject to change. (We don't want to get into the French practice of trying to regulate a living language according to ossified principles.)
3. Once your children have mastered standard English, (age 25 or so) introduce the concept that in particular circumstances they can add to the power and resonance of their writing or speaking by knowledgably and creatively breaking the rules.
4. Then introduce the writing and telling of fiction, including dialogue, which is a whole nother subject.
5. Finally, hope they develop language skills to the level that there is no such thing as a synonym.
There's only one Lake Michigan, but you don't say "the Lake Michigan". And there's only one Washington Monument (at least, of any consequence), but you still say "the Washington Monument".
Sure, you can always find a rule that works for one specific example. "Don't say the first thing, say the second" works. The problem is, that's not the actual rule. I picked these examples because nobody knows what the actual rules are.
In Socal, most major highways are "the 405," "the 10," etc.
In Iowa, it's "I-80," "I-380," "Highway 1," "Highway 30," etc.
In Michigan, it's "475," "75," "69," etc.
These are just the places I've happened to live.
I've been amused by the Southern California-ized road identifications on "24" this season, allegedly set in DC. The characters referred at one point to "the I-495," which I assume is not the way people would put it inside the Beltway.
Larry, you are my friend forever! Grammar is important to me in a social way. I do not my son's future social relationships to be hindered by a lack of grammatical acumen.
But for his being a human, and his communication with me (and, more importantly, with himself) I don't give a whit whether he uses Newfoundland dialect, Ebonics, or the "Queen's English". Understanding is rarely compromised by grammatical novelty. But understanding depends on concepts, and facility with concepts relies heavily on vocabulary. You are right: there is no such thing as a synonym. But I do not see this as much as an end product of language development
I have seen primary school teaching that is positively destructive to the making of find distinctions. In learning synonyms for 'big', children are encouraged to 'spice up' their writing by trying to use more 'interesting' words when they can. So the children replace occurences of 'big' with 'large', 'vast', 'humungous', 'huge', etc. But never does the teacher model the use of these words, or in any way teach that there is no such thing as a vast elephant, or a humungous desert. Meanwhile, the children learn to pride themselves with their pseudo-sophistication. (Why don't children know the word 'chagrin'? Don't they experience it? Might the word not help them to identify their experience of it? It is not a 25-dollar word. All they need is for adults to use the word around them.)
Ask me, and I will relate some ugly incidents from my -own- time spent as an elementary school 'language arts' student.
I don't think that works, since 'Oak' is not an adjective here. You might say "He lives on the street in Boston that is called 'Oak street'". (Or you could identify a street with such adjectives as "the oldest street in Boston" or "the first crescent in the new subdivision".)
I had a discussion with my niece about "The New Jersey Turnpike". She said that "New Jersey" was an adjective. IANALinguist, and perhaps there is overlap between adjective and possessive. "New Jersey" functions more as a possessive, I think. It is elbow distance from "New Jersey's turnpike", or "the turnpike of New Jersey."
Thinking about this stuff feels to me like walking into deep water. There are moments when, suddenly, it is only your toes, if anything, that is touching the ground, and familiar orientation is lost. I don't know if linguistics in interesting in spite of that, or because of it!
A better example might be "Hand me the Yugoslavia report". Here at least it seems that "Yugoslavia" does modify "report", just like "Hand me the nonsensical report". But again you can't say the report is "very Yugoslavia". So it still acts as a noun.
By this reasoning "pregnant" isn't an adjective. Neither is "best".
As someone already said, it's easy to find a simple, obvious, rule that's plausible for the examples you're thinking about but turns out to be wrong when you try it somewhere else.
I'm glad you made that clear. I was picturing some kind of brutal, Kingsfield-style Socratic questioning to correct the error.
Where road names are concerned, the "the" seems more called-for when the name is more of a description than a proper name; in rural areas where they're not so formal and bureaucratic as to have assigned official names to roads, they might be called by residents things like "The old river road"; later, when the county officials sweep in and insist that (perhaps for the sake of emergency 911 systems) the roads be explicitly named on street-signs, maps, and postal addresses, the road may become "Old River Rd." with no "the". Then perhaps the old-timers will keep saying it with a "the", while newcomers won't.
So you don't buy this: http://www.cocaine.org/coca-cola/index.htmL ?
There are lots of references to early coca-cola having cocain in them, are you contending that they are all incorrect?
Gramatically, you can be "very pregnant" just as you can be "very happy". The biology is not part of grammar.
It's important to distinguish between what grammar does and what a knowledge of the way the world works does. For example, "Young Mary saw a bicycle in the store window. She wanted it." To what does the word "it" refer? The bicycle, the store, or the window? Grammatically, they're equally good with perhaps a slight preference for the window since it's closest. Or is it a preference for the bicycle, since it's the subject?
"In the store window, Mary saw a bicycle. She wanted it." What now?
Grammar can't make it the bicycle in both cases. But it clearly is. Why? Because this "rule" doesn't come from grammar.
Same here. The test with a degree modifier to see if something is an adjective is a grammatical test. If a degree modifier works gramatically, it's (almost always) an adjective.
"Very preganant" and "slightly impossible" work grammatically. (Though not logically.)
As a different point using your same examples, the bicycle is not actually 'in' the store window, yet the meaning is still clear.
In the case of the New Jersey Turnpike its more a matter of tradition or common local usage.Nope. The actual name of the road system is "New Jersey Turnpike" therefore the whole term is a noun. In the same way, "New York" is a noun naming a state and "San Antonio" is a noun naming a city. The terms have nothing to do with age or spiritual level.
Grammar rules vary with usage. Biologically a woman is either pregnant or not pregnant. As far as her husband is concerned a woman at nine months is a whole hell of a lot more pregnant than she was at one month.
Gramatically, you can be "very pregnant" just as you can be "very happy". The biology is not part of grammar.
Something can be somewhat New Jersey too, and similarly, the main reason we don't say that is that being somewhat New Jersey is grammatically possible but not factually possible.
But that is not the case in "New Jersey Turnpike". The Turnpike does not have characteristics one associates with New Jersey.
1) Linguists, particularly historical linguists tend to be descriptivists. Prescription is for computer programming languages.
2) Standard dialects and grapholects are interesting but not all non-conforming speech is an error if it occurs in a different dialect. For example, the Black American English "I be goin' to the store" is remarkably difficult to translate to Contemporary Standard American English (and impossible to reasonably translate without adding additional words or phrases. Translation between dialects is remarkably difficult.
3) A lot of the oddities in Modern English have to do with mergings between Old English, Old Norse (from the Danelaw), and Old French (from the Normans). Middle English shows all the typical signs of creolization and so a number of oddities appear and internal logic disappears.
But "am" is the proper verb-form of "to be", right? So is "I am goin' to the store" remarkably difficult?
What I usually hear is "Ima go to the store" anyway, which being translated is "I am going to go to the store". You just have to know that.
Well, it's located in New Jersey, which I think counts.
But even if it didn't, it would just prove that the meaning of "New Jersey" as an adjective is a little broader. It would mean something like "has the name 'New Jersey'." "Has the name" doesn't disqualify something from being an adjective.
But that isn't how "I be going to the store" is actually USED in BAE. Instead it could mean something like "I am now the one who goes to the store" or "I how frequently go to the store."
It most certainly does not mean "I am going to the store." Once you get through your head that it is used as a verb tense that DOESN'T EXIST in Contemporary Standard American English (it is closer to the impertect tense of Spanish, but not a simple match there either), the problem becomes more clear.
Wow, some people take these points of language waaaay too seriously!
Interesting, and it may exemplify a number of things. Yugoslavia is a proper noun. What distinction if any might we make between [1] "Yugoslavia report" and [2] "Yugoslavia Report"? Spoken, they are identical. Your [1] makes me think of perhaps some sales report pertaining to Yugoslavia, but nothing that even tenuously belongs to Yugoslavia in a posessive way (as in "Yugoslavia border" or "Yugoslavia GDP").
In the context of a UN convention (say) where member countries are giving reports, "Yugoslavia report" looks odd. More natural to my eye would be "Yugoslavia Report" (proper noun), or "the Yugoslavian report" (adjective).
If it were unpublished speeches, "The Yugoslovia speech" would seem to me a sloppy way of saying "Yugoslavia's speech". How about proposals? To my ear, "T[t]he Yugoslavia P[p]roposal" sounds neither more nor less a title than a possessive.
You can force the adjectival interpretation by using "Yugoslavian", but the rules for "adjectifying" the names of states seem no more clear to me. Interesting. (These questions were all rhetorical by the way!)
(More "Food for Thought" ...
"Bruce Wayne's estate"
"The estate of Bruce Wayne"
"The Wayne estate" (?)
"The Wayne Estate"
"A New York Minute"
"A New York state of mind"
"The New York Yankees"
"German Occupation" (not Germanic Occupation)
"French Resistance"
"French Cooking"
"French Dressing"
"Italian Dressing" (not Italy Dressing)
"Texas Chili" (or should that be Texan Chili?)
"Philadelphia Cream Cheese" (yum!)
...forgive the pun!)
Only if you want to mistranslate. "I be goin' to the store" isn't a simple present like you're thinking (that'd be, I believe, "I goin' to the store"), it's habitual, so it means something more like "I'm always going to the store" or "I'm the one who goes to the store".
What you just did is the same thing that drove my Latin teachers up the wall when dealing with Latin's present perfect. Alea iacta est - everybody and their dog can figure out that if "alea" is "the die" and "iacta" is "thrown" and "est" is "is" then using a simple word-for-word substitution you get "The die is thrown". And you're wrong, because you're forgetting that Latin isn't English in the same way that AAVE isn't your own dialect. Alea iacta est means the die *has been* thrown, a subtle distinction of meaning.
(I only switched to talking about Latin because I suspect some people might find it a more erudite subject than AAVE.)
The die has been thrown?
or
The die is in a thrown state?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est
("That tree is fallen" implies that "that tree has fallen" so the implication that the die has been cast in this case is good, however.)
should be were, can't believe no one corrected misuse of subjunctive
That has got to be a regional thing. I've NEVER heard "I goin' to the store" in all my years in Mississippi and in Memphis, TN, unless it was from a two-year-old.
"Be" might be used thus: "I'll be goin' to the store, right, and he'll be like, 'where are you going,' and I'm like, 'none of your business,' and he'll be all, 'don't talk to me that way'...." But teenagers talk that way regardless of race.
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