"We the people"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:58 PM -0500 3/15/02, Thomas Paikeday wrote:
>An interesting subheading from today's paper: "Why do I love wrestling?
>... It gives we the people what we want."
>
>Linguistic change being what it is, I was wondering whether this "It
>gives we ..." is more idiomatic than "It gives us ..." or is it just an
>editorial aberration?
>
I think the intended parsing is "It gives [we the people] what we
want", where "we the people" is an invariant form.  Maybe that's what
you mean by idiomatic; it's not that "we the people" is an idiom but
it's a collocation or (what Orwell called) a prefabricated unit.

larry

P.S.  And I *still* don't think the guy in Norwegian Wood was coming
on to the girl and wishing she "wood"