"We the people"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:53 PM -0500 3/15/02, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>Maybe you don't teach undergraduates!  (Or perhaps Yalies don't do this....)

Not yet, but I'll watch for it.

>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'.

Maybe, but that "he who is without sin" is a definite prefab.

>  (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?)
>
Right--that's the point:  it's another prefab.  I've heard "runneth"
in precisely the context Ben mentions, where you would have gotten a
simple infinitive in Middle or early Modern English.   I've also
encountered -eth  in third person *plurals*, where speakers would
never have been caught dead using it in "ye olden days" [sic].  I
think of these uses as mock Tudor.

larry