[Ads-l] More Facebookery

[Jonathan Lighter]

Solution: don't speak of such things.

JL

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:07 AM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> 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
>


-- 
"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