One of the expressions listed in the indictment of the savants is he don’t, a contraction, of course, of he does not. Here in Virginia many men of the highest education use the phrase habitually. Their ancestors have used it for many generations, and it might be argued with some reason that when the best blood and the best brains of Virginia use an expression for so long a time it becomes correct, regardless of the protests of the professional grammarians.105
According to Menner, the widespread use of the present for the preterite is relatively recent. “In almost all the comic writers of the first half of the [Nineteenth] Century,” he says, gin and give are in rivalry as the preterites of to give, but in “Huckleberry Finn” give prevails. He suggests that its rise may be due to the fact that a number of common verbs showing the same vowel, e.g., hit, quit and spit, are unchanged in the preterite. Certainly it is a fact that such verbs are apparently rather more often put into the new historical present in the vulgate than those of any other class. Examples are begin, sit and win. But the other verbs seem to be going the same way, and the vulgar preterite of one of them, sez, i.e., says, appears to be older than give. Charters’s material offers many specimens, among them “We help distributed the fruit,” “She recognize, hug, and kiss him” and “Her father ask her if she intended doing what he ask”; and Lardner has “If Weaver and them had not of begin kicking” and “They would of knock down the fence.” I notice that used, in used to be, is almost always reduced to simple use, as in “It use to be the rule,” with the s very much like that of hiss. One seldom, if ever, hears a clear d at the end.106 Here, of course, the elision of the d is due primarily to assimilation with the t of to — an example of one form of decay aiding another.
3. THE PRONOUN
The following paradigm shows the usual inflections of the personal pronoun in the American vulgate:
These inflections are often disregarded in use, but nevertheless it may be profitable to glance at them as they stand. The only variations that they show from Standard English are the substitution of n for s as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between the logical and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the usual sign of the plural to the former. The use of n in place of s 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. In John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible (c. 1380) the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount (Mark v, 3) is made: “Blessed be the pore in spirit, for the kyngdam in hevenes is heren.” And in his version of Luke xxiv, 24, is this: “And some of ouren wentin to the grave.” Here heren (or herun) represents, of course, not the modern hers, but theirs. In Old English the word was heora, and down to Chaucer’s day a modified form of it, here, was still used in the possessive plural in place of the modern their, though they had already displaced hie in the nominative.107 But in John Purvey’s revision of the Wycliffe Bible, made a few years later, hern actually occurs in II Kings vii, 6, thus: “Restore thou to hir alle things that ben hern.” In Old English there had been no distinction between the conjoint and absolute forms of the possessive pronoun; the simple genitive sufficed for both uses. But with the decay of that language the surviving remnants of its grammar began to be put to service somewhat recklessly, and there arose a genitive inflection of this genitive — a true double inflection. In the Northern dialects of English that inflection was made by simply adding s, the sign of the possessive. In the Southern dialects the old n-declension was applied, and there appeared such forms as minum and eowrum (mine and yours), from min and eower (my and your).108 Meanwhile, the original simple genitive, now become youre, also survived, and the literature of the Fourteenth Century shows the three forms flourishing side by side: youre, youres and youren. All of them are in Chaucer.
As for the addition of s to you in the nominative and objective of the second person plural, it exhibits no more than an effort to give clarity to the logical difference between the pure plural and the merely polite plural. Another device to the same end is the familiar dual, you-two, which also appears in the first and second persons, as in we-two, us-two and them-two.109 Yet another, confined to the South, is you-all or y’all, which simply means you-jointly as opposed to the you that means thou.110 The substitution of the plural you for the singular thou began in England in the Thirteenth Century, and at the same time analogous substitutions occurred in the other Western European languages. In these languages the true singular survives alongside the debased plural, but English has dropped it entirely, save for poetical and liturgical uses and in a few dialects. It had passed out of ordinary polite speech by Elizabeth’s day. By that time, indeed, its use had acquired an air of the offensive, such as it has today, save between intimates or to children, in Germany. Thus, at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, Sir Edward Coke, then Attorney-General, displayed his animosity to Raleigh by addressing him as thou, and finally burst into the contemptuous “I thou thee, thou traitor!” And in “Twelfth Night” Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to provoke the disguised Viola to combat by thouing her.111 In our own time, with thou passed out entirely, even as a pronoun of contempt, the confusion between you in the plural and you in the singular presents plain difficulties to a man of limited linguistic resources. He gets around them by setting up a distinction that is well supported by logic and analogy. “I seen yous” is clearly separated from “I seen you” And in the conjoint position “yous guys” is separated from “you liar.”
Of demonstrative pronouns, there are but two in Standard English, this and that, with their plural forms, these and those. To them, vulgar American adds a third, them, which is also the personal pronoun of the third person, objective case.112 In addition it has adopted certain adverbial pronouns, this-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there, and set up inflections of the original demonstratives by analogy with mine, hisn and yourn, to wit, thisn, thesen, thatn and thosen. I present some examples of everyday use:
Them are the kind I like.
Them men all work here.
Who is this-here Smith I hear about?
These-here are mine.
That-there medicine ain’t no good.
Those-there wops has all took to the woods.
I wisht I had one of them-there Fords.
I like thesen better’n thosen.
The demonstratives of the thisn-group seem to be composition forms of this-one, that-one, etc., just as none is a composition form of no(t)-one. In every case of their use that I have observed the simple demonstratives might have been set free and one actually substituted for the terminal n. But it must be equally obvious that they have been reinforced very greatly by the absolutes of the hisn-group, for in their relation to the original demonstratives they play the part of just such absolutes and are never used conjointly. Thus, one says, in American, “I take thisn” or “Thisn is mine,” but one never says “I take thisn hat” or “Thisn dog is mine.” In this conjoint situation plain this is always used, and the same rule applies to these, those and that. Them, being a newcomer among the demonstratives, has not yet acquired an inflection in the absolute. I have never heard them’n, and it will probably never come in, for it is forbiddingly clumsy. One says, in American, both “Them are mine” and “Them collars are mine.”
This-here, these-here, that-there, those-there and them-there are plainly combinations of pronouns and adverbs, and their function is to support the distinction between proximity, as embodied in this and these, and remoteness, as embodied in that, those and them. “This-here coat is mine” simply means “This coat here, or this present coat is mine.”113 But the adverb promises to coalesce with the pronoun so completely as to obliterate all sense of its distinct existence, even as a false noun or adjective. As commonly pronounced, this-here becomes a single word, somewhat like thish-yur, and these-here becomes these-yur, and that-there and them-there become that-ere and them-ere. Those-ther
e, if I observe accurately, is still pronounced more distinctly, but it, too, may succumb to composition in time. The adverb will then sink to the estate of a mere inflectional particle, as one has done in the absolutes of the thisn-group. Them, as a personal pronoun in the absolute, of course, is commonly pronounced em, as in “I seen em,” and sometimes its vowel is almost lost, but this is also the case in all save the most exact spoken English. Sweet and Lounsbury, following certain German grammarians, argue that this em is not really a debased form of them, but the offspring of hem, which survived as the regular plural of the third person in the objective case down to the beginning of the Fifteenth Century. But in American them is clearly pronounced as a demonstrative. I have never heard “em men” or “Em are the kind I like,” but always “them men” and “Them are the kind I like.” It is possible that them, in this situation, may be a descendant of the Old English thaem (those).
The relative pronouns are declined in the vulgate as follows:
Two things will be noted in this paradigm. First there is the disappearance of whom as the objective form of who, and secondly there is the appearance of an inflected form of whose in the absolute, by analogy with mine, hisn and hern. Whom is fast vanishing from Standard American;114 in the vulgar language it is virtually extinct. Not only is who used instead in situations where good usage has begun to tolerate it; it is also used in such constructions as “The man who I saw” and “Them who I trust in.” George Philip Krapp explains this use of who on the ground that there is a “general feeling,” due to the normal word-order in English, that “the word which precedes the verb is the subject word, or at least the subject form.115 But this explanation is probably fanciful. Among the plain people no such “general feeling” for case exists. Their only “general feeling” is a prejudice against case inflections in any form whatsoever. They use who in place of whom simply because they can discern no logical difference between the significance of the one and the significance of the other.
“The relative whose,” says R. J. Menner, “is a rare word in popular speech. One may listen to conversations for weeks without hearing it.”116 Not infrequently that and a genitive pronoun are substituted for it, as in “He’s a fellow that I don’t know his name,” and sometimes that is omitted, as in “He was a man I never trusted his word.” But sometimes whose is used in place of the forbidding whom, especially when a genitive sense is apprehended, e.g., “Bless those whose it’s our duty to pray for.” In the absolute whosen is sometimes used, as in “If it ain’t hisn, then whosen is it?”, obviously under the influence of the other absolutes in -n. There is an analogous form of which, to wit, whichn, resting heavily on which one. Thus “Whichn do you like?” and “I didn’t say whichn” are plainly variations of “Which one do you like?” and “I didn’t say which one.” That, as we have seen, has a like form, thatn, but never, of course, in the relative situation. “I like thatn” is familiar, but “The one thatn I like” is never heard. If that, as a relative, could be used absolutely, I have no doubt that it would change to thatn, as it does as a demonstrative. So with what. As things stand, what is sometimes substituted for that, as in “Them’s the kind what I like.” Joined to but it can also take the place of that in other situations, as in “I don’t know but what.”
The substitution of who for whom in the objective case, just noticed, is typical of a general movement toward breaking down all case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last stand in English and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not peculiar to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning. So long ago as the Fifteenth Century the old clear distinction between ye, nominative, and you, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between ye and thee, the objective form of the true second singular, was responsible for this confusion.117 In modern spoken English, indeed, you in the objective often has a sound far more like that of ye than like that of you, as, for example, in “How do y’ do?” and in American its vowel takes the neutral form of the e in the definite article, and the word becomes a sort of shortened yeh. But whenever emphasis is laid upon it, you becomes quite distinct, even in American. In “I mean you,” for example, there is never any chance of mistaking it for ye. In Shakespeare’s time the other personal pronouns of the objective case threatened to follow you into the nominative, and there was a compensatory movement of the nominative pronouns toward the objective. The late T. R. Lounsbury collected many examples.118 Marlowe used “Is it him you seek?”, “ ’Tis her I esteem” and “Nor thee nor them shall want”; Fletcher used “ ’Tis her I admire”; Shakespeare himself used “That’s me.” Contrariwise, Webster used “What difference is between the duke and I?” and Greene used “Nor earth nor heaven shall part my love and I.” Krapp unearthed many similar examples from the Restoration dramatists.119 Etheredge used “ ’Tis them,” “It may be him,” “Let you and I” and “Nor is it me”; Matthew Prior, in a famous couplet, achieved this:
For thou art a girl as much brighter than her
As he was a poet sublimer than me.
This free exchange, in fact, continued until the Eighteenth Century was well advanced; there are examples of it in Addison. Moreover, it survived, on the colloquial level, even the furious attack that was then made upon it by grammarians, and to this day it’s me is in good usage, and most authorities of any sense, if they do not actually defend it, at least condone it.120 On the level of the vulgate, it is firmly intrenched. The schoolmarm continues to inveigh against it, but her admonitions go unheeded. Similarly, “us fellas” is so far established that “we fellas” from the mouth of an iceman would seem almost an affectation. So, too, is “Me and her are friends.” So, again, are “Her and I set down together,” “Him and his wife” and “I knowed it was her.” Here are some other characteristic examples of the use of the objective forms in the nominative from Charters, Lardner, Rogers and others:
Me and her was both late.
His brother is taller than him.
That little boy was me.
Us girls went home.
They were John and him.
Her and little Al is to stay here.
She says she thinks us and the Aliens.
If Weaver and them had not of begin kicking.
Us two’ll walk, me and him.
But not me.
Him and his gang.
Him and I are friends.
Me and them are friends.
Here are some grotesque confusions, indeed. Perhaps the best way to get at the principles underlying them is to examine first, not the cases of their occurrence, but the cases of their non-occurrence. Let us begin with the transfer of the objective form to the nominative in the subject relation. “Me and her was both late” is obviously sound American; one hears it, or something like it, on the streets every day. But one never hears “Me was late” or “Her was late” or “Us was late” or “Him was late” or “Them was late.” Again, one hears “Us girls was there” but never “Us was there.” Yet again, one hears “Her and John was married” but never “Her was married.” The distinction here set up should be immediately plain. It exactly parallels that between her and hern, our and ourn, their and theirn: the tendency, as Sweet says, is “to merge the distinction of nominative and objective in that of conjoint and absolute.”121 The nominative, in the subject relation, takes the usual nominative form only when it is in immediate contact with its verb. If it be separated from its verb by a conjunction or any other part of speech, even including another pronoun, it takes the objective form. Thus “Me went home” would strike even the most ignorant shopgirl as “bad grammar,” but she would use “me and my friend went” or “me and him” or “me and them” without the slightest hesitation. What is more, if the separation be effected by a conjunction and another pronoun, the other pronoun also changes to the objective form, even though its contact with the verb may be immediate. Thus one hears “Me and her was there,” not “me
and she”; “Her and him kissed,” not “her and he.” Still more, this second pronoun commonly undergoes the same inflection even when the first member of the group is not another pronoun, but a noun. Thus one hears “John and her was married,” not “John and she” To this rule there is but one exception, and that is in the case of the first person pronoun, especially in the singular. “Him and me are friends” is heard often, but “Him and I are friends” is also heard. I seems to suggest the subject powerfully, and is the actual subject of perhaps a majority of the sentences uttered by an ignorant man. At all events, it resists the rule, at least partially, and may even do so when separated from the verb by another pronoun, itself in the objective form, as, for example, in “I and him were there.”
In the predicate relation the pronouns respond to a more complex regulation. “I seen he” or “He kissed she” or “He struck I” would seem as ridiculous to an ignorant American as to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his instinct for simplicity and regularity naturally tends to make him reduce all similar expressions, or what seem to him to be similar expressions, to coincidence with the more seemly “I seen him.” I incline to think that it is some such subconscious logic, and not the analogy of “It is he,” as Sweet argues, that has brought “It is me” to conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English.122 In compensation for this use of the objective form in the nominative position there occurs in vulgar American a use of the nominative form in the objective position, as in “She gave it to mother and I,” “She took all of we children” and “Anything she has is O.K. for I and Florrie,” all borrowed from Lardner.123 What lies at the bottom of this seems to be a feeling somewhat resembling that which causes the use of the objective form before the verb, but exactly contrary in its effects. That is to say, the nominative form is used when the pronoun is separated from its governing verb, whether by a noun, a noun-phrase or another pronoun, as in “She gave it to mother and I,” “She took all of we children” and “He paid her and I,” respectively. But here usage is far from fixed, and one observes variations in both directions — that is, toward using the correct objective when the pronoun is detached from the verb, and toward using the nominative even when it directly follows the verb. “She gave it to mother and me,” “She took all of us children” and “He paid her and me” would probably sound quite as correct, to a Knight of Pythias, as the forms just given. And at the other end Charters and Lardner report such forms as “I want you to meet he and I” and “It is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the baby.” I have noticed, however, that the use of the nominative is chiefly confined to the pronoun of the first person, and particularly to its singular. Here again we have an example of the powerful way in which I asserts itself. And superimposed upon that influence is a cause mentioned by Sweet in discussing “between you and I.”124 It is a sort of by-product of the pedagogical war upon “It is me.” “As such expressions,” he says, “are still denounced by the grammars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in writing. The result of this reaction is that the me in such constructions as ‘between John and me’ and ‘he saw John and me’ sounds vulgar and ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I.” Here the schoolmarm, seeking to impose an inelastic and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeeds only in corrupting it still more.
American Language Page 62
