"They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

[Dan Goncharoff]

I think the phrase 'clangs' because the 'me out' combination is usually used
in situations where 'out' means 'away from here':

Take me out to the ballgame

or is non-directional:

bawl me out

The 'out' in the phrase in question goes in the wrong direction for 'me'.

DanG


On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "They was trying to hand me out a flyer."
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 12, 2011, at 10:25 AM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>
> > I remember a song in Sunday school as a kid, one line of which went,
> "Hand me down my silver trumpet, Gabriel."
>
>
> or "Hand me down my walking cane", from another song.  But these are both
> "hand down *to* me", with the pronoun as recipient, while the "hand me out a
> flyer" involves a kind of benefactive, one closer to the "ethical dative" in
> German, French, and many other languages, a kind of secondary beneficiary
> affected by but not intimately connected to the action.  In other languages,
> this is freer ("You need to do me your homework").  This isn't, however, the
> "personal dative" of southern/mountain U.S. English, which is coreferential
> with the subject ("She needs her a new pickup truck").
>
> LH
>
>
> > I found the syntax interesting at the time. Not actually bad, but
> interesting because of the garden-path effect of "hand me down," which I
> suspect is the same thing going on when "hand me out a flyer" sounds odd.
> >
> > Neal
> >
> > On Jul 12, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK> wrote:
> >
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> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Damien Hall <D.Hall at KENT.AC.UK>
> >> Subject:      "They was trying to hand me out a flyer."
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> George said:
> >>
> >> 'Is "hand me out" really common in England?'
> >>
> >> Yes - and in the rest of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)
> as well.  Well, I'd say 'hand out a flyer to me' would be the majority
> variant, but 'hand me out a flyer' is a pretty common minority variant,
> maybe commoner in production in the North of England than elsewhere, and I
> don't think it would be thought of as especially unusual by any native
> speaker of BrE that heard it.
> >>
> >> So, sentences like the following made-up ones are completely acceptable
> to me (Standard Southern British English, brought up in London, but with
> lots of family in the North):
> >>
> >> 'The doctor wrote me out a prescription.'
> >>
> >> 'I'm waiting for him to send me that back' ( = 'send back that [thing]
> to me')
> >>
> >> etc etc.
> >>
> >> There has been some work done on the acceptability of these sentences, I
> think by Bill Haddican (then of the University of York, which is in the
> North of England, of course; now of CUNY Queens) - he would have done it
> exactly because Americans can't usually produce sentences like that (and he
> is American).  I'll ask him whether he has any results from it.
> >>
> >> Damien
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >> Damien Hall
> >>
> >> University of Kent (UK)
> >> Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of
> France'
> >>
> >> English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and
> Languages
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------
> >> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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