"I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed in."

[Robin Hamilton]

Makes me nostalgic for "Ben Jonson His Book".

Robin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: "I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed
in."


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently
> packed
>              in."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 3:26 PM -0500 2/17/11, Seán Fitzpatrick wrote:
>>Latitudinarian codswallop.  <<"Any thing" go's.>>  And that's "final".
>>
>>I have encountered the supposed rule that "who-whose-whom" cannot be used
>>with non-human antecedents several times in the past few decades.
>>
>>The programmers I work with often use non-neutral personal pronouns to
>>refer
>>to programs and modules:  "... If he can't find a match he throws an
>>exception and dies".  I don't go that far, but I would say "whose hard
>>drive".
>
> It's actually pretty understandable if you grant
> the confusion between the interrogative "whose"
> and the relative "whose".  After all, the
> standard English pattern is pretty weird:
>
> Whose leg is broken?
> Ken's
> *The dining table's
> vs.
> the man/table whose leg is broken
>
> So now for some it's
>
> the man whose leg is broken (or perhaps "who's leg")
> the table that's leg is broken
>
> LH
>
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