[Ads-l] "In my room"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I'm familiar with this from 19th C. Irish English.

"In the room of" = 'in place of; instead of'

"He shot his true love in the room of a swan." (Old Ballad)

(Not in a swan's room, n.b.)

JL

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:

> Yes, yes, I'm quite familiar with the song....
>
>
>
> On 7/13/2017 5:41 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>
>> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-dWhYklqE
>>
>> On Jul 13, 2017 6:12 PM, "Jim Parish" <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:
>>
>> A while back, I was reading Pepys' Diary and was struck by the repeated
>>> (metaphorical) use of "in my room", where, in my idiolect, "in my place"
>>> or
>>> even "in my stead" would be more natural. Now, I'm reading _Roderick
>>> Random_, written about eighty years later, and I have encountered the
>>> phrase again.
>>>
>>> I have never run into the phrase anywhere else, and certainly not in any
>>> contemporary source. So I'm curious: is this construction still in use
>>> anywhere? Does anyone know when and where it was used?
>>>
>>>
>>> Jim Parish
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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