Re: USAGE: Hither, thither and yon (was Re: Weekly Vocab 26)

On 19 Oct 2003 at 18:07, Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Roger Mills wrote:
>
> > Paul Bennett/A.Walker/M.Reed have discussed--
> > > What about the phrase "Hither, thither and yon", which I've
> > > encountered in quasi-archiac contexts (i.e. from my Grandparents)
> > > meaning "All over the place"? Is this something unique to both sets
> > > of my grandparents (from different regional and social lects), or is
> > > it just British, or is it archaic, or what is the exact distribution?
> > >
> > Yes, that's familiar to me too, in a grandparently context; the 3 who were
> > US-born were pure upper midwest in speech.
>
> Funny, I'd associated it with British. But then, Archaic and British are
> almost synonyms to me, conceptually :) (It doesn't help that my
> grandmother---the Australian one---uses archaisms and sounds relatively
> British. Or maybe she sounds British because she uses them. At any rate,
> she used 'us' in the singular a while ago, something I've never heard my
> parents (or any of their generation) do, so she's either copied it off my
> generation (unlikely) or it skipped a generation or something. Is singular
> us used in Britain? (e.g. 'pass us the knife' was what she said)).
Very, very commonly in a number of regional low-register dialects. I
suspect, in fact, that it's becoming the 1st person dative form in
some dialects. The complete list of English pronouns in some dialects
is thus:

"I" /Aj/ Nominative and list-reciting (the 1st Person, when used in
lists of people, is always moved to the end of the list and always
placed in the nominative)

"me" /mi/ Accusative

"my" /mI/ ~ /m@/ Genetive

"us" /@s/ Dative.




Paul

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