Is this a good sentence?

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 18, 2013, at 7:15 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>> "I love me some him."
>
> If anybody ever said that, I'd vote it QOTY.
>
> Who's the verbal genius/moron responsible?
>
> JL

“I Love Me Some Him”, rendition by Toni Braxto, nlyrics by SoulShock & Karlin, Andrea Martin, and Gloria Stewart, with the chorus

I love me some him
I’ll never love this way again
I love me some you
Another man will never do

reached the top of the charts in 1997, and has been a snowclone ever since (try googling "I love me some").  It's also the title of an obscure 2008 paper ('"I love me some him": the landscape of non-argument datives') by some linguist or other, but s/he's probably not the genius/moron you're referring to. Cf. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1868 for related discussion.

LH

>
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Is this a good sentence?
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
>> wrote:
>>> I'm not about "good" or "bad" when it's not my dialect, but my guess (in
>> print a few years back) is that people who want to try out the personal
>> dative because it's trendy ("I love me some him", "I love me some Wilson
>> Gray", "He needs him a new pickup", etc.) but don't really control the
>> construction end up using the reflexive (because they're used to using the
>> reflexive in ordinary indirect object sentences ("He got himself a new
>> pickup").  So the "correct" dialectal ordinary pronoun in the above
>> sentence ("..to those who love them some heavy metal") is naturalized to
>> the reflexive ("…to those who love themselves some heavy metal").
>>
>>
>> Once thar you've explained it, it has become transparent! Well done! ;-)
>>
>> --
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>>
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>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
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