8 Vol. II, p. 264.
1 American English Grammar, before cited, pp. 152–53.
2 Shall and Will, American Speech, Aug., 1929, pp. 497–98.
3 The Future Tense in English, College English, March, 1944, pp. 333–37.
4 Says Eldon Emerson Smith, of Sterling, Colo. (private communication, Sept. 2, 1938): “The common speech future of all verbs in the indicative mode is ‘I’m gonna bite,’ or whatever verb. Gonna is pronounced with a long o. The future tense is frequently confused with the present progressive, as in ‘I’m going to Europe next Summer.’ ” In the potential mode may has been almost completely displaced by can.
1 Is the Subjunctive Dying?, English Journal (College Edition), May, 1937, pp. 369–73.
2 Ernest Weekley, in On Learning English. London Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 12, 1944, p. 391, says that the same is true for England.
3 American Use of the Subjunctive, American Speech, Feb., 1931, pp. 207–15.
3. THE PRONOUN
448. [The use of n in place of s, as in ourn, hern, yourn, and theirn is not an American innovation. It is found in many of the dialects of English, and is, in fact, historically quite as sound as the use of s.] Joseph Wright, in his “English Dialect Grammar,” gives some curious double forms, analogous to hisn, e.g., hers’n in Cheshire, wes’n in Gloucestershire, and shes’n in Warwickshire, Berkshire and other counties. David Humphreys, in his glossary of 1815, listed hern as an Americanism, and Adiel Sherwood, in 1827, put hisn into the same category, though noting that “many of our provincialisms are borrowed from England.” Thomas G. Fessenden denounced both in “The Ladies’ Monitor,” 1818, as “provincial words … which ought to be avoided by all who aspire to speak or write the English language correctly.” Hern, in the form of hiren, is actually traced by the NED to 1340; ourn, in the form of ouren, to c. 1380; yourn, in the form of youren, to 1382, and hisn, in the form of hysen, to c. 1410. The grammarians of the Seventeenth Century declared war on all these possessives, and they have been denounced in the grammar-books ever since,1 but they survive unscathed in the popular speech. Curme indicates that the somewhat analogous thisn, thatn, thesen and thosen are now mainly American, but shows that whosen occurs “in the south of England and in the Midlands.”2 I find some exhilarating specimens in my collecteana:
Whatever is ourn ain’t theirn.
If it ain’t hisn, then whos’n is it?
I like thisn bettern thatn.
Let him and her say what is hisn and hern.
Everyone should have what is theirn.3
The last of these reveals a defect in English that often afflicts writers and speakers on much higher levels, to wit, the lack of singular pronouns of common gender.4 When, on September 27, 1918, Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech at a Red Cross potlatch in New York, he permitted himself to say “No man or woman can hesitate to give what they have,” but when the time came to edit it for his “Selected Literary and Political Papers and Addresses” he changed it to “what he or she has.” Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt fell into the same trap in 1941, when she wrote in “My Day”: “Someone told me last night that they …”5 On lower levels there are specimens almost innumerable, e.g., “When a person has a corn they go to a chiropodist.”6 Since 1858, when Charles Crozat Converse, the composer (1832–1918), tried to launch thon for he or she (and apparently also for him or her) and thon’s for his or her, various ingenious persons have sought to fill this gap in English, but so far without success. In the days of her glory as the queen of American schoolma’ams, Ella Flagg Young (1845–1918), superintendent of the Chicago public schools, asked the National Education Association to endorse hiser (his plus her) and himer (him plus her), but the pedagogues gagged. Both terms, however, were listed in the College Standard Dictionary, 1922, and in 1927 the late Fred Newton Scott (1860–1930)1 gave them a boost in a magazine article,2 though with hiser changed to hizzer, himer to himmer, and hesh (he plus she) added. In 1934 James F. Morton, of the Paterson (N.J.) Museum, proposed to change hesh to heesh and to restore hiser and himer. But none of these terms has ever come into use, even among spelling reformers, nor has there been any enthusiasm for the suggestion that English adopt the French indefinite pronoun on, which is identical in singular and plural.3
This on, in the Fifteenth Century, seems to have begot the English pronoun one, but the latter continues to have so foreign and affected a smack that the plain people never use it, and even the high-toned seldom use it consistently, at least in this country. In England one occasionally encounters a sentence through which ones run like a string of pearls, but in the United States the second and succeeding ones are commonly changed to he or his.4 In 1938 Gregory Hynes, an Australian lawyer, proposed se for he plus she, sim for him plus her, and sis for his plus her,5 but there were no audible yells of ratification. Nor did any follow the suggestion of a reformer of Primghar, Iowa, Lincoln King by name, that ha be used in the nominative case, hez in the possessive and hem in the objective. Nor the suggestion of a correspondent of the Washington Post1 that hes, hir and hem be adopted. Nor has thon ever got beyond the blueprint stage, though it made the Standard Dictionary and Webster 1934, along with thon’s. In despair of getting rid of the clumsy his or her otherwise, the late Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) once proposed a bold return to “the rude days … when we used merely to use his.”2
When, in 1926, the twenty-six linguists consulted by Sterling Andrus Leonard decided by a vote of 23 to 3 that it is me is sound English, and when, during the same year, the College Entrance Examination Board decided that nascent freshmen were free to use it, there was an uproar in academic circles but no noticeable jubilation among the plain people, for they had been using the form for centuries, and, what is more, they had been supported by many accepted authorities. Noah Webster allowed it in his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” 1784, and the celebrated John P. Mahaffy, provost of Trinity College, Dublin (1839–1919), not only allowed it but did a lot of whooping for it. In defense of it he devised the following dialogue:
A. We saw you and your wife on the beach this morning.
B. Oh, but we didn’t go out, so it can’t have been us.
What rational person, demanded Mahaffy, would have said, “it can’t have been we?”3 Rather curiously, American Speech, then edited by Dr. Louise Pound, took an editorial slap at the College Entrance Examination Board for its action,4 but this was atoned for in 1933 by the publication of a thundering defense of it is me by Wallace Rice.5 Rice mustered an array of sages ranging from Joseph Priestley to W. D. Whitney, from A. H. Sayce to Havelock Ellis, and from Thomas R. Lounsbury to Alexander J. Ellis, all of whom upheld it as sound idiom. He might have gone much further, for George H. McKnight had assembled dozens of examples of it is me and even of it is him and her from sound authors in the first issue of American Speech,1 and Otto Jespersen had brought together many others, and discussed the whole question with his accustomed good sense in 1894.2 In Shakespeare’s time the use of the objective pronoun had not yet established itself, and it is I was still the commoner form, though everyone will recall “Damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold! Enough!,’ ”3 but c’est moi, exactly analogous to it is me, had come into French in the Sixteenth Cenury, and it was soon influencing English.4 Today most American philologians, though perhaps not most schoolma’ams, would probably agree with Rice:
In the oral lessons given little children throughout the United States it is I is banged into their minds, and it is me is ranked with ain’t got none and a long list of similar vulgarisms.… What a waste! What is accomplished? I can remember back sixty years to my share in a frenzied dance of the first form at school, a dozen of us yelling “It is I, it is I!” in derisive contempt for minutes together after we had just been told for the first time that this alone was correct. I believe this to be the normal attitude of the right-minded boy, and one that persists through life.5
J. M. Steadman found support for this when, in 1937, he polled the st
udents of Emory University at Atlanta, Ga., to find out what words and phrases they considered affected. His tally-clerks reported that first place was taken by limb, but that it is I was a good second, and ran ahead of expectorate.6 The Linguistic Atlas of New England7 shows that it is me prevails overwhelmingly in that region, even within the Boston area. Most of the informants who reported it is I confessed that their use of it was the product of belaboring by the schoolma’am. “Whenever I used me,” one of them said, “the teacher would say, ‘Who is me?,’ and then I’d change it quick.” But not many of those consulted recalled the horrors of education so clearly. “If somebody knocked at my door and called ‘It’s I,’ ” a New York school teacher told a writer for the New York Times in 1946,1 “I’d faint.” In late years it is me has even got support from eminent statesmen. When, just before Roosevelt II’s inauguration day in 1933, the first New Deal martyr, the Hon. Anton J. Cermak, was shot by a Nazi agent in Florida, he turned to Roosevelt and said, “I’m glad it was me instead of you,” and when, in March, 1946, the Right Hon. Winston Churchill made a recorded speech at New Haven he introduced himself by saying, “This is me, Winston Churchill.”2 Just why me has thus displaced I is in dispute. A correspondent suggests that it may be because I “suggests the ego too strongly,” but S. A. Nock thinks that it is because “the nominative I is colorless.”3
Various authorities, including Sir William Craigie,4 have suggested that the school grammarians’ war upon it is me has prospered between you and I, just as their war upon I seen has prospered I have saw. Wyld shows that you and I was thus used by English writers of the Seventeenth Century,5 and Henry Alexander produces examples from Pepys’s Diary,6 including between him and I. Robert J. Menner, dissenting from the Craigie theory, believes that the form came in because you and I were “often felt to be gramatically indivisible,” and because you “had come to be used for both nominative and accusative.”7 He says:
Pronoun or noun plus I after preposition and verb … is coming to be the natural usage at certain speech levels. Yet when the first personal pronoun precedes another pronoun or noun it is not normally in the objective form in careless speech. I heard the following from one man calling to another from a porch:
A. They invited me and Jim.
B. (Not having heard) What?
A. (louder) They invited Jim and I to their party.
This is natural syntax among people who are neither at the lowest speech level, where me and him and her are common as nominatives, nor at the highest, where family tradition or academic training make the standard literary forms prevail.
Craigie says that “no one would venture to carry this confusion so far as to say between you and we,” but I am not too sure, for I have encountered he in the objective following a preposition in the headline of a great moral newspaper.1 Mark Twain, a very reliable (if sometimes unconscious) witness to American speechways, used between you and I regularly until W. D. Howells took him in hand.2
Whom need not detain us, for it does not exist in the American common speech. Even in England, says the NED, and on the highest levels, it is “no longer current in natural colloquial speech.” When it is used on those levels in the United States it is frequently used incorrectly, as F. P. Adams used to demonstrate almost daily when he was conducting his newspaper column.3 It was rejected as “effeminate” by Steadman’s Emory University students,4 and got as many adverse votes as divine, dear and gracious (exclamation). Indeed, only sweet, lovely and darling beat it. The Linguistic Atlas of New England shows that its use there is pretty well confined to the auras of Harvard and Yale, and that even so it is rare. George H. McKnight has supplied evidence that many English authors of the first chop, including Richard Steele, Jane Austen, George Meredith and Laurence Housman have used who freely in situations where whom is ordained by the grammar-books,5 and I have no doubt that a similar inquiry among Americans would show many more. J. S. Kennedy, in 1930, printed a learned argument to the effect that the use of who in “Who did he marry?” need not be defended as a matter of mere tolerance, but may be accounted for on the ground that who, in this situation, is actually in the objective case, and has been so almost as long as you has been in the nominative.1 Just, he says, as “we have objective you and nominative you side by side, with ye preserved in the unstressed form in speech and also for very formal or archaic styles,” so “we have nominative who and objective who side by side, with whom reserved for more formal style, chiefly written.” In the common speech that is often substituted for both who and whom, as in “He’s the man that I seen.” Robert J. Menner has shown2 that that has also largely displaced whose, as in “He’s the fellow that I took his hat,” and that often even that itself is suppressed by periphrasis, as in “He’s the fellow I took his hat” and “She’s the girl I’ve been trying to think of her name.” The substitution of them for these or those, as in “Them are the kind I like,” was denounced as a barbarism of the frontier South and West by Adiel Sherwood in 1827, but it has survived gloriously and Wentworth offers examples from all parts of the country. Says Horace Reynold:
The use of them as a demonstrative is the mark of the manual worker. He finds these and those a little sissified and high-toned. He feels more comfortable in them shoes than in these shoes. Them is a word with a strong end; a man can get his teeth into it. Like the Irishman’s me for my, them beats these hollow for force. The Irishman’s “Give me some likker to temper me pain” has the same shirtsleeve, spit-on-me-hands wallop as the American’s “Shut them winders!”3
The Southern you-all seems to be indigenous to the United States: there is no mention of it in Wright’s “English Dialect Dictionary” nor in his “English Dialect Grammar.” What is more, it seems to be relatively recent. Wentworth quotes “I b’lieve you’ all savages in this country” from Anne Royall’s “Letters From Alabama,” 1830, but it is highly probable that this you’ all was simply a contraction of you are all. You-all struck a Northerner visiting Texas as “something fresh” so late as 1869, though he had apparently been in the South during the Civil War and was familiar with you uns.4 It was not listed by any of the early writers on Americanisms, and it is missing even from Bartlett’s fourth and last edition of 1877. On the question of its origin there has never been any agreement. In 1907 Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, then head of the English department at the University of North Carolina,1 published a learned paper on the subject in Uncle Remus’s Magazine (Atlanta), then edited by Joel Chandler Harris,2 in which he rehearsed some of the theories then prevailing. One, launched by a correspondent of the New York Times signing himself F. B.,3 ascribed the pronoun to the influence of the Low German spoken by German settlers in Lunenburg, Mecklenburg, Brunswick and Charlotte counties, Virginia. This correspondent said:
A little imagination will help us see two old dignitaries meet and address each other with “Good’n morn, wohen wilt ye all?” (Whence will ye already?). And after the confab is over they will express their regret by saying “Wilt ye all gaan?” (Wilt ye already go?) and the answer, “Ya, we wilt all foort” (Yes, we will already forth).
Another theory, also advanced by a correspondent of the Times,4 was thus set forth:
During the Cotton Exposition at New Orleans, 1885–86, I was in an official position which brought me into contact with hundreds of people from all parts of the Union, and as I was from Texas I seemed singled out for benevolent missionary work on the part of visitors from Northern States. With cheerful frankness they pointed out the many shortcomings of my people, and among them this idiom of you-all. I was boarding at the time with a Frenchwoman. I poured out to her my woes in English, and she expressed her sympathy in French. When I mentioned you-all as one of our sins she exclaimed: “Mais c’est naturelle, ça! On dit toujours nous tous, vous tous!”
Smith rejected both of these etymologies, and sought to show, by quotations from Shakespeare and the King James Bible, that you-all went back in England to Elizabethan times,5 but his quotations offered him
very dubious support, for those that were metrical showed the accent falling on all, not on you, and in another part of his article he had to admit that this shift of accent clearly distinguished the Southern you-all from you all in the ordinary sense of all of you. He sought to explain the difference as follows:
In you all, all is an adjective modifying the pronoun you. But in you-all the parts of speech have changed places. All is the pronoun, standing for some other substantive, as folks, and you is the modifying adjective. This interchange is not without analogy in English. In such phrases as genitive singular and indicative present the first words were originally nouns, singular and present being adjectives. The plurals were genitives singular and indicatives present. But these phrases, borrowed from Latin, were exceptions to the usual position of words in English, which demands that adjectives precede nouns. The exception could not hold its own against the precedent established by the numberless phrases in which adjectives regularly preceded their nouns. After a while, such was the influence of mere position, the words genitive and indicative, standing in the normal position of adjectives, became adjectives, and the words singular and present, standing in the normal position of nouns, became nouns. Thus the plurals of these phrases are now genitive singulars and indicative presents. In similar fashion you all (pronoun plus adjective) passed into you-all (adjective plus pronoun).
Like any other patriotic Southerner, Smith devoted a part of his paper to arguing that you-all is never used in the singular, and to that end he summoned Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page as witnesses. This is a cardinal article of faith in the South, and questioning it is almost as serious a faux pas as hinting that General Lee was an octoroon.1 Nevertheless, it has been questioned very often, and with a considerable showing of evidence. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to be sure, you-all indicates a plural, implicit if not explicit, and thus means, when addressed to a single person, you and your folks or the like, but the hundredth time it is impossible to discover any such extension of meaning. Eleven years before Smith wrote, in 1896, correspondents of Dialect Notes had reported hearing the pronoun in an unmistakable singular in North Carolina, Delaware and Illinois,1 and during the years following there had been a gradual accumulation of testimony to the same effect from other witnesses, including Southerners. In 1926 Miss Estelle Rees Morrison provoked an uproar by suggesting in American Speech that, when thus used in the singular, you-all was a plural pronoun of courtesy analogous to the German sie, the Spanish usted, and indeed the English you itself.2 In May, 1927, Lowry Axley, of Savannah, declared in the same journal that in an experience covering “all the States of the South,” he had “never heard any person of any degree of education or station in life use the expression in addressing another as an individual,” and added somewhat tartly that the idea that it is ever so used “by any class of people … is a hydra-headed monster that sprouts more heads apparently than can ever be cut up.” A correspondent signing himself G.B. and writing from New Orleans, offered Axley unqualified support three months later,3 but after two more months had rolled round Vance Randolph popped up with direct and unequivocal testimony that you-all was “used as singular in the Ozarks” and that he had “heard it daily for weeks at a time.”4
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