nom. for acc. (again)

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:47 PM -0700 8/27/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Aug 27, 2007, at 11:36 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>>I saw this hypercorrection switcheroo today in a syndicated newspaper
>>article on a released prisoner:  The ex-prisoner said his wife had
>>stuck
>>with him because they had sworn "Till death do we part."  Amusing, if
>>impossible.
>>
>>Then again, maybe it's not the usual hypercorrection.  Since the
>>subjunctive mood of the frozen phrase is probably no longer
>>understood, the
>>speaker (many, perhaps?) may have thought 'we' and 'do' must agree
>>since
>>'death' and 'do' couldn't.  I use a couple of such frozen phrases
>>in class
>>to illustrate syntactic change, and students often can't explain the
>>structures even though they know the phrases "by heart":
>>So be it
>>Be that as it may
>>Albeit
>>Would that it were so
>>And more word order inversion:
>>With this ring I thee wed
>>etc.
>
>surely the right analysis.  speakers are making the verb agreement
>"look right", even though it doesn't really make sense -- but then
>it's a fixed expression, and they don't *have to* make sense.
>
Then there's "woe am I"--lots of hits for both this and "woe is I",
neither of which makes a lot of sense, even if you didn't grow up
with the German or Yiddish versions of "woe is me" with the clear
dative (as my own childhood was marked by the not infrequent cry of
"vay'z mir").  The very first hit on google for "woe am I" is an
amazon review of a book by Patricia O'Conner entitled _Woe is I:
Therapy for Pronoun Anxiety_; comments the reviewer, 'The book's
title is a sly kick at the perils of grammatical over-correctness: it
should actually be "Woe Am I", but that just wouldn't sound right.'
Woe indeed, if not whoa.  (And yes, there are 28,600 hits for "Whoa
is me", with at least one citing it as an eggcorn.)

LH

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