The Korean(-American) passive "himself"?

[Joel S. Berson]

On April 9 Wilson Gray wrote:
>Sants pruh-zarve us! How soon they forget! When I was a kid in the
>'Forties, this use of "-self" in cartoons, comics, movies, and on
>radio shows to indicate that someone was Irish was as common as the
>use of "gwine" to show that someone was black. Stereotypical
>Irishwomen always referred to their husbands as "himself," for example.

 From The New York Times, Wed. April 18, New England Final, 1/3, by
Manny Fernandez and Marc Santora:

"Mr. Cho's eruption of violence, in which 32 victims and himself were
killed on the Virginia Tech campus here in a rampage of gunfire, was
never directly signaled by his actions or words ... ".

This construction is certainly awkward.  Was Cho killed by someone
else, such as a police officer?  Were the other 32 killed by someone
else?  Aha, the passive, which lets the columnists avoid assigning
responsibility for the killings.

The responsibility for the "himself" must rest with the authors, so
perhaps it has become Hispanic-American.

(There is an obvious alternative, which I know I saw and probably in
the very same newspaper:  "in which he killed 32 victims and then
himself on the Virginia Tech campus ...".)

Joel

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