[Ads-l] "we ... _ourself_"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Jul 29 18:36:13 UTC 2018


Or editorial “we”, so this one passes muster for me.  Certainly more straightforwardly than your “We women are defining ourself”, which as noted desperately needs an “each”.

> On Jul 29, 2018, at 2:30 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> ... we had but little more than comfortably reposed ourself ...
> 
> Isn't he using the "royal _we_"?
> 
> On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 10:07 PM George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
> wrote:
> 
>> After breakfasting at the American, one of the numerous cars attached to
>> the Locommotive furnished us a seat in which we had but little more than
>> comfortably reposed ourself, when our door was opened, and several heads
>> obtruded themselves, with the cry, “Any passengers for the west” —“The old
>> line packet boat goes in half an hour”— “The best line goes at 3 this
>> afternoon”—&c. &c
>> North River Times (Haverstraw, N.Y),  July 24, 1835
>> 
>> He'd started in Albany, taken a train west, and woken up in Schenectady by
>> the obtrusive canal boat touts.
>> 
>> GAT
>> 
>> On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 5:41 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Summer's Eve TV commercial:
>>> 
>>> "We women are redefining _ourself_."
>>> 
>>> --
>>> -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
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> George A. Thompson
>> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>> Univ. Pr., 1998.
>> 
>> But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
>> your lowly tomb. . .
>> L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112
>> 
>> The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
>> picture of his great-grandfather.)
>> 
>> http://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/artwork/james-gillray/an-excrescence---a-fungus-alias-a-toadstool-upon-a-dunghill/3851
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -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

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



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