'We' for 'I' in writing

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:25 PM -0700 6/19/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Francis J. Child's text of the ballad "Captain Ward and teh
>Rainbow," from an English broadside, has:
>
>"Go tell the King of England, go tell him thus from me, /
>          If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at
>sea.’"   [
>http://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/faculty/stampe/Oral-Lit/English/Child-Ballads/child.html#287
>]
>
>The later version appearing here  [
>http://www.contemplator.com/sea/ward.html ] has
>
>"Go home, go home, says Captain Ward
>And tell your king for me,
>If he reigns king all on the land
>Ward will reign king on the sea."
>
>(The second site has a great Midi, BTW)
>
>"From" sounds slightly more informal to me, but I'm sure I use both.
>
>JL

I at least imagine there's a slight difference, emerging from the
usual function of "from" to indicate source and "for" either goal or,
in this case, benefactive/substitutive (= 'for the sake of').   The
"tell them from me", in other words, is something like 'make it clear
to them that the information comes from me', while "tell them for me"
is either 'tell them in my stead" or 'tell them for my sake' or
whatever, but in any case without the implication that I am (that is,
Mark is) the source of the opinion.

L

>
>Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Wilson Gray
>Subject: Re: 'We' for 'I' in writing
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Jun 19, 2005, at 4:48 PM, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>  -----------------------
>>  Sender: American Dialect Society
>>  Poster: "Mark A. Mandel"
>>  Subject: Re: 'We' for 'I' in writing
>>  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>  --------
>>
>  > Larry writes:
>>>>>>>
>>  It's a consequence of the law of preservation of number. It's the
>>  fault of the copy-editors at the U. of Chicago Press who (when they
>>  can tear themselves away from their "which"es and "that"s) insist on
>>  changing all 1st person plurals--including the joint
>>  me-author-and-you-reader-are-in-this-together "we"--to singulars, so
>>  that my references to e.g.
>>
>>  As we have seen in Chapter 2,...
>>  We can see from these examples that...
>>  We can distinguish the following cases:
>>
>>  were systematically changed to
>>
>>  As I have seen in Chapter 2,...
>>  I can see from these examples that...
>>  I can distinguish the following cases:
>  > <<<<<
>>
>>  You can tell them from me
>
>Didn't this concept used to be expressed as "... tell them _for_ me
>..."? Or is this merely a case of a trivial difference in dialect?
>
>-Wilson Gray
>
>>  that they're nuts and that they ought to be
>>  ashamed of themselves.
>>
>>
>>  -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
>>  Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
>>  a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
>>  [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>>
>
>
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