which its = "whose"

[Jonathan Lighter]

No fad.

Bret Harte's once beloved "Plain Language from Truthful James" (1870)
begins - begins, mind you -

Which I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

Accident? Not on your bippy. Later:

Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand.

Harte later called it "possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote."

It was, of course, frequently anthologized.

JL


On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: which its = "whose"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This reminds me (though is probably unrelated to) another extended use of
> "which" as an unconnected headless relative (or maybe conjunction) I've
> been noticing that I'm sure someone has described (Ben? Arnold? Neal?).
>  It's hard for me to remember instances, or find the ones I've jotted down,
> but they're something like this (googled) example:
>
> so we're looking at my OKCupid profile, which I don't know why this is as
> embarrassing as it is
>
> It might could be paraphrased as "speaking of which".  I tried searching
> Language Log but only got a lot of posts on "which" vs. "that", not "which"
> vs. "and", or whatever's going on here.
>
> Maybe it's a fad--must be the season of the "which".
>
> LH
>
> On Jun 13, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > Long ago I mentioned the difficulty even  grad students in English had 30
> > years ago with "whose" as a subordinating conjunction after something not
> > human, as in "an idea whose time has come." (Some online grammarians now
> > prefer the counter-rational "subordinate conjunction." Right.)
> >
> > One of the grotesque conjunctions the studes used was "which's."  Another
> > was the perhaps genetically identical "which its."
> >
> > Now grownups use it:
> >
> >
> http://cnn.org/2014/06/11/opinion/ben-ghiat-world-war-one/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
> >
> >
> > "the Submarine was introduced in the 19th Century by the French called
> the
> > Plongeur, Which its designs were used by the Confederates to build the
> H.L.
> > Hunley"
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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