"you love yourself some me"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

A line from Mariah Carey's "For The Record", from her new album "E=MC2":

   The whole entire world can tell
   That you love yourself some me.

This perhaps alludes to Toni Braxton's 2003 song "I Love Me Some Him",
discussed a couple of years ago by Larry Horn:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0502d&L=ads-l&P=15845

But Mariah opts for a reflexive pronoun in her personal dative, which is far
less typical.

The song lyric came to my attention from catching part of tonight's
"American Idol". Mariah, after singing a guest performance, tells judge
Randy Jackson (her erstwhile musical director), "The whole entire world can
tell that I love myself some him... some Randy," which she then identifies
as a line from her new album. So in that transposed version it sounds even
more like the Toni Braxton line, except with reflexive marking.


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org