"We the people"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:08 PM -0500 3/15/02, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>I suspect it's an unfortunate hypercorrection caused by the familiarity of
>the phrase.  I'm now getting student papers with things like "Everyone
>knows that if you give he/she so-and-so, ..."  They've been told they must
>use singular with 'everyone', so they assume 'he/she' must follow, no
>matter what the syntax is.

I actually haven't seen the nominative showing up in unconjoined
contexts like these, but rather in conjunctions like "If you give it
to he and I,..." where the hypercorrection doesn't have anything to
do with a quantified antecedent like "everyone" but comes, I assume,
from having to first learn that you're supposed to say "He and I
[went to the park]" instead of the more natural "Me and him...", and
concluding (at least unconsciously) that "he and I" is "better" than
"him and me".  So maybe these are two separate hypercorrections, but
I've never come across the one you mention.

larry