[Loch-Ruadh] Word of the Day, April 6-7

[Cait O'Hara]

His-self

A courtier will say, “Let him do it himself,” but the Cockney has it, “Let him do it his-self.”  Here the latter comes nearest to the truth, though both he and the courtier are wrong, for the grammatical construction should be, “Let he do it his-self,” or, by a transposition of words, better and more energetically arranged, “Let he his-self do it.”  It must be allowed that the Londoner does not use this compound pronoun in the mode before us from any sense of conviction.  He has fortunately stumbled upon a part of the truth which the courtier has overleaped … [as] the nominative in the singular number is my-self, and not me-self.
-- Smauel Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language, c. 1803

Feast Day of Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, a patron of schoolteachers.





---
Never meddle in the affairs of dragons;
For you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
-- Acacia



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