[Ads-l] More Facebookery

[Laurence Horn]

It’s one of those situations where grammar, at least my grammar, provides no feasible option (unlike the “one of the damn {things/*thing} is enough” case):  “any of us’s child” is no better.  Of course, the Romance prepositional phrase option is OK—“the child of any of us”—but that avoids rather than solves the problem.  Similarly, “I asked one of my friend’s mothers”/“…one of my friend’s mother”:  both impossible. If it were second person instead of first, there’s always “She could have been any of yall's child”—no problem.

LH

> On Jul 26, 2018, at 11:02 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Usage pretty familiar to me from undergraduates forty years ago.
> 
> JL
> 
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 11:30 PM Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> "She could have been any of our’s child."
>> 
>> [Full disclosure: the writer is my second cousin, once removed.]
>> 
>> --
>> -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
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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