Timeline for Why doesn't it go like "him and his wife"?

Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0

15 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Jul 18, 2015 at 7:16	comment	added	Mari-Lou A		I'm tending towards deadrat's interpretation. @JanusBahsJacquet if the speaker wanted to imitate, what he believed was "correct" speech, he would not immediately follow up with helluva. And I wouldn't rule out the possibility of this expression being a rural dialectal form, I have seen and heard stranger utterances from native speakers.
Jul 13, 2015 at 21:52	comment	added	deadrat		@PeterCordes The character isn't following his "own" non-standard usage rules. His is a common grammatical error. What he's doing is not bothering to follow the standard usage rules as dictated by an adult world for which he has little respect.
Jul 8, 2015 at 2:22	comment	added	Peter Cordes		Hypercorrection shows up in the language of characters in fiction all the time. Usually rural characters embarrassed about their countrified speech pattern when talking to someone who doesn't speak that way. It's how you know they're trying hard to sound less uneducated. Perhaps this case is an exception to the rule that incorrect usage of forms like "I" instead of "me" is a sign of a less-educated character trying to be proper, though. I'm inclined to agree with @Janus that intentionally following your own non-standard usage rules is a weird way to rebel.
Jul 8, 2015 at 1:52	comment	added	deadrat		LittleEva is on the money here. Holden Caufield is the poster boy for holding "school-based, learned behavior" (and most adult attitudes, mores, and institutions) in contempt. It's hard to imagine that the character cares enough about grammar to be "hypercorrect."
Jul 8, 2015 at 0:31	comment	added	bdsl		This answer doesn't address the author's intentions. If this was non-fiction I would agree that 'he' is a hyper-correction, but I'm not convinced that Salinger intended it to be read as such rather than simply as an error.
Jul 7, 2015 at 22:37	comment	added	Janus Bahs Jacquet		@LittleEva I would say almost certainly 2). It would be quite an odd way of rebelling against conventions. It’s similar to how you ‘shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition’—no teenager would rebel by overdoing that and start saying things like “For what did you do that?” instead of “What did you do that for?”. Weird rebellion, at least. [I use my own, personalised keyboard layout in OS X, so em dashes are easy for me. On Windows machines, I usually end up doing it the ugly way: holding down the <kbd>Alt</kbd> key and then type <kbd>0151</kbd> on the numeric pad on the right.]
Jul 7, 2015 at 22:28	comment	added	user98990		@Janus Bahs Jacquet - thanks for bearing with me here, the reason I pursued this is because there is a fundamental disagreement in the answers, 1) a more or less intentional departure from grammatical convention by an established rebel, and 2) unintentional hypercorrection. On an unrelated subject - how do you get the em-dash, all I seem to be able to use is the hyphen?
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:49	comment	added	Janus Bahs Jacquet		@LittleEva No, nothing like that. Just that using he where it should be him is not a native part of any dialect at all, so it’s not how any native speaker of English learns to speak—it’s school-based, learned behaviour, which makes it less likely to be informal, slangy teenspeak. (And I’m assuming that you really learnt to speak through hearing and speaking as a toddler, long before you learnt to read, since that’s the natural way of learning how to speak. Writing is a different matter, of course.)
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:43	comment	added	user98990		@Janus Bahs Jacquet - the technical explanation of what is occurring (pronoun shift) is new to me, as I learned to speak & write, almost exclusively, through reading (consequently, I'm learning my grammar here). I guess what I was asking you was, is there something explicit in the Catcher that informed your conclusion that Holden's use of 'he' rather than 'him' was due to something other than the informal and slangy speech of a teen who found all adult rules and conventions to be ... hypocritical bullshit?
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:16	comment	added	Janus Bahs Jacquet		→ the result of people applying the rule their teachers had taught them to situations where the ‘rule’ doesn’t apply. Despite Latinate grammarians’ best efforts, the oblique-for-subject substitution is almost mandatory in some dialects (in high-frequent use in all of them, at least), appears mostly in spontaneous, informal speech, and is noted several hundred years back. Conversely, subject-for-oblique appears randomly in individual speakers of all dialects (never consistently), appears especially in careful or formal speech, and is noted much later.
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:12	comment	added	Janus Bahs Jacquet		@LittleEva The same way everyone else who knows how the pronoun shift in English works. Substituting oblique forms of pronouns (me, him, etc.) for subject forms (I, he) is a process that began centuries ago and has spread throughout the entire Anglosphere, but was long decried as ‘incorrect’ by 18th- and 19th-century grammarians who based their knowledge on Latin, rather than English. As such, teachers have been continually teaching their pupils not to do that ever since. The reverse substitution, however, has never taken place on a large scale in English at all—it only shows up as →
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:08	comment	added	user98990		@Janus Bahs Jacquet - but how do you arrive at that understanding?
Jul 7, 2015 at 19:41	history	edited	Misti	CC BY-SA 3.0	added 9 characters in body
Jul 7, 2015 at 19:13	comment	added	Janus Bahs Jacquet		+1 for being the only answer so far to mention that this he is an instance of hypercorrection. It’s nothing to do with the fact that Holden is not good in school—it’s that he’s trying to speak correctly, but failing because he doesn’t understand the underlying rule.
Jul 7, 2015 at 18:49	history	answered	chasly - supports Monica	CC BY-SA 3.0