Timeline for Have...going for one/oneself
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Jan 30, 2018 at 22:42 | comment | added | Lambie | In the samples taken from books by the OP, there are basically two categories: AmE speech by a couple of characters and bad "news writing". Therefore, they can't be a basis for coming to a decision. People say what they say. The real question is this: Where and when are you going to be writing this?? And then one looks inward to one's own experience. Personally the self sounds awful to my AmE ear. However, in fast speech, it might slip out. | |
| Jan 28, 2018 at 14:27 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | @JeremyC that's not impossible and even for every-day use it strikes me as so far fetched, you're not going to be able to cite instances of the relic's development. Meanwhile "Your Ladyship/ Honour/ Grace" etc are specific honorific styles of address and I don't understand how they have a place here. | |
| Jan 28, 2018 at 10:04 | comment | added | JeremyC | The usage "What can we do for yourself?" is probably a relic of the idea that the blunt word "you" is too direct, especially when addressing superiors, as in "Your Ladyship, Your Honour, Your Grace, etc". | |
| Jan 27, 2018 at 20:02 | comment | added | user 66974 | @RobbieGoodwin - well as I said they are non standard usages of the more established form of the idiomatic expression, whatever the reason may be. | |
| Jan 27, 2018 at 19:01 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | My inclination is to go with Ross. To me, all those examples feel wrong but that's not all there is to it. There might be dialects involved here. "What can I/we do for yourself today?" is a real example I hear not infrequently from call-centre people whose accents put them vaguely in the English Midlands. They never seem to go as far as "myself/ourselves" and they never fill out "you yourself" and I wouldn't swear to it but I think they do always add "just now" if not "today". Nothing to do with what they have going for them but apparently more idiom than mistake on the reflexive front… | |
| Jan 26, 2018 at 13:37 | comment | added | user 66974 | @JK2 - The usage of a reflexive pronoun after the preposition “for” is common usage, but it has nothing to do with the expression in question. books.google.com/ngrams/… | |
| Jan 26, 2018 at 12:41 | comment | added | user 66974 | @JK2 - well, you can see from the Google chart that usage instance of reflexive pronouns is a small percentage compared to the more usual form. In any case it is an idiomatic expression, a set phrase. So what is your question? Grammar, usage, standard vs non-standard or what? | |
| Jan 26, 2018 at 12:33 | comment | added | JK2 | Just so you know, it's not just "only a few instances of the use of the reflexive pronoun." There are plenty of instances in Google Books as well as Google News. And it's not really convincing to argue that simply not being listed in dictionaries makes a phrase non-standard. | |
| Jan 26, 2018 at 9:15 | history | edited | user 66974 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 26, 2018 at 9:10 | history | edited | user 66974 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 26, 2018 at 9:04 | history | edited | user 66974 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 26, 2018 at 8:57 | history | answered | user 66974 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |