Re: Cases, again
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, March 19, 2004, 18:37 |
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On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 06:09:29PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> I've even heard - I kid you not - "You must come to Richard and I's
> house sometime."
Yes, well, the possessive of conjoined nouns has been known to confound
many a locutor, rather understandably IMHO. The correct version of the
above is presumably "Richard's and my", but we're used to sticking the
possessive at the very end of a noun and the speaker is thinking of
"Richard and I/me" as a single noun unit. So in regular speech, as
opposed to careful writing, I'm not at all surprised to hear things like
"Richard and I's" or "Richard and my" or - my favorite of all time and
actually heard by me, albeit not with the name "Richard" - "Richard and my's".
-Mark
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