"We the people"

[Beverly Flanigan]

Maybe you don't teach undergraduates!  (Or perhaps Yalies don't do this....)
But these are for real; I've had two or three such occurrences in just the
past quarter.  Your examples are also all too familiar, of course.  We've
noted the use of subject 'whom' too, esp. with an intervening "I think" or
"I believe"-type clause, which makes me believe the "let he who" example
Ben cites is just another such hypercorrection; without an intervening
'who' clause, the speaker/writer would very likely use 'him'.  (But where
did Ben get "make my cup runneth over"?  As I recall, it's "he maketh my
cup to run over"--good Early Modern English, right?)

At 02:26 PM 3/15/02 -0500, you wrote:
>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


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm