case choice by rhyme

[Baker, John]

        It's not new.  Compare Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXX:

"And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."

        Shakespeare didn't need the rhyme, but he did need a
monosyllabic reference for his dark lady.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 3:32 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: case choice by rhyme

another kind of example, which came by on my iTunes  (sung by Blossom
Dearie) a little while ago...

from "You for Me", music by Harold Arlen, Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
(1959):

Take a look and see
You've hooked the she
Who'll agree
Quite cheerfully...

here, the personal pronoun (in the nominative, in this case) is used
like an ordinary head noun.

i'm sure there are other examples out there of
   a/the she/her/he/him
but search engines really aren't good at picking the good stuff out.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), annoyed to discover that the lyrics
don't seem to be available on the web, presumably because of copyright
fanatacism (on the Harold Arlen site, i was given the option of
licensing the song)