Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
producer.
Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
 Send the Brainiac bloggers a
comment on a post.
  Week of:
November 11
Week of:
November 4
Week of:
October 28
Week of:
October 21
Week of:
October 14
Week of:
October 7
Mind the gap
Shop talk What he learned in the newsroom Mr. Boffo lays an eggcorn Curse of the mummy's tummy More in Word Watch  |
« Where does education take you? | Main | Lethem, again » Wednesday, March 14, 2007Woe is us, Part 1I've been reading the new book by Ben Yagoda, "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse" (you can read the first chapter here, and his recent piece in the L.A. Times on the gender-neutral pronoun -- also covered in the book -- here). And in the chapter on pronouns, I came upon this: [When I answer the phone], how should I respond? Standard English mandates that the verb be be followed by the subjective case, which would have me say something like "This is he." . . . But in the current millennium, that kind of thing sounds fatally stuffy. This is obvious to songwriters, who have given us such works as Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me" and (better yet) Crystal Gayle's "If Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me"; to Shakespeare, who had Ophelia say, "Woe is me"; and to the writers of the King James Bible, who used the same statement three separate times, including Isaiah 6:5: "Then said I, Woe is me! For I am undone." Woe, indeed. We are wandering in the grammatical wilderness when a college professor thinks that "Woe is me" is the unstuffy, 21st-century corruption of "Woe is I." It's not so: "Woe is me" is the original, genuine, and grammatically correct expression, and it has nothing to do with the predicate nominative. "This is he" vs. "This is him" is a different thing entirely. Why "Woe is me"? Because Old English had a dative case (you may have met the dative in Latin class), the form used for the indirect object. In the sentence "I gave him the book," him is the indirect object; in Old English, it would have appeared in the dative case. This is not arcane knowledge. The OED explains the use of woe "construed with a dative (or, later, its equivalent), with or without a verb of being or happening, in sentences expressing the incidence of distress, affliction, or grief." It has abundant examples of "woe unto me," "woe is me," "woe were us" and the like, from "Beowulf" to the late 19th century. There are no instances of "woe is I" or "woe is they." So why the confusion? Well, it turns out the fog has been gathering for a while. But I'll leave the rest of this woeful tale for a later post -- or two. Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:02 PM
|
