Word is arguing with me that “theirselves*” is not a word, but the Scottish part of my brain is refusing to give it up. I have been using that word since I was knee high to a splinter, it makes sense in my head, but I know someone would bitch about it as a grammatical error or some such if I used it in Phangs.
Which is unfortunate, cause as it would turn out, I’ve used it. A lot.
*themselves just doesn’t have the same meaning? Don’t ask I don’t know. It’s likely a colloquial thing.
I get it, you want a possessive pronoun instead of an objective one?
YES, thank you I’ve been trying to pin it down and sitting here just saying the word over and over trying to figure out why it feels right.
There is a slight semantic difference! You’ll see people claim that ‘theirself’ is technically incorrect grammar but that’s prescriptivist talk. If there’s a hole in the lexicon someone will fill it 😉
I mean it’s already there, it exists in Scottish dialect. I just know I’ll likely get schtick for putting it in a book, or some pedant will pick up on it and leave a remark about it not being “proper English”, which no, it’s not. But I feel it should be. It fills a gap, as you say. And language ought to change with the times.
Huh. I’d never realised I used theirselves until this very moment. It’s a real word dang it!
Right?! It wasn’t until it got pointed out to me and I had to run stuff through Word to fix something that I was like “what do you mean that’s not a word, it is too a bloody word!”
I also only recently discovered that “outwith” isn’t a word outside of Scotland…that might have been one of your revelations too but I can’t remember. Either way, the rest of English is missing out.
It’s fucking what now?
But…but it’s such a good word… what do people say instead? Outside? Without? … but they don’t have the same inherent meaning.
Oh well. Fuckit.
Sorry Phangs readers, but you’re about to get a crash course in learning Scots dialect. Hold onto yer bunnets.
how would someone use ‘outwith’, what’s it mean?
“Outwith the norm” or “outwith his expectations”.
Which I suppose “outside” would work, but it feels janky on my tongue to say that. I’ve always used outwith when talking about like thingy-things like experiences or perceptions, while outside is reserved for real physical things like “you’ve parked outside the line” or “he’s outside the house”, though I dare day there’s some folk use “outwith” for those too.
I’m pretty sure we do have that in US English, it’s just two separate words.
“out with the old, in with the new”
Out with and outwith have very different meanings though.
to clarify grammatically, yeeten here is used because it is the past participle, yote is the simple past of the verb “to yeet” and therefor not applicable here. To flip your main noun to the subject of the sentence, grammar demands you use an auxiliary verb (in this case to be) and the past participle. This is what is known as using the passive voice.
But consider: yaught
we are NOT bringing semimodals into this i thought i was OUT OF LANGUAGE HELL
i just realized what all of this reminds me of it reminds me of the time I spent 20 minutes in high school German debating with my friends how the word “derp” should be conjugated re: regular or irregular conjugation
every time I use “they” to refer to a single gender-unknown person on Tumblr, another piece of my grammar-filled heart shatters, and the pieces scatter at the bottom of hell
“They” has been a singular pronoun for hundreds of years, you melodramatic dipshit.
well… actually… no… they is plural. people use they when they should use he, she, or it.
dense motherfucker, the pronoun “they” is an english equivalent for the third person indefinite singular and has been for literally centuries. it remains morphologically and syntactically plural therefore you don’t need to shit your little pantaloons at compromising your surely rock solid grammar rules.
i guarantee every fuckin time you’ve ever had to refer to a person of an unknown gender you’ve used “they” subconsciously. (“The post clerk gave me a message for you.” “Oh, what did they say?”) but you only have a problem with it when people specify it as a pronoun for themselves because you’re a shitlord i fuckin guess.
“Eche on in þer craft ys wijs.” (“Each one in their craft is wise.”) — [Wycliffe’s Bible], Ecclus. 38.35 (1382)[19]
“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up…” Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales (circa 1400)[20] quoted by Jespersen and thence in Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage.[21]
“Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy.” — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)[22]“If a person is born of a … gloomy temper … they cannot help it.” — Chesterfield, Letter to his son (1759);[23] quoted in Fowler’s.[24]
“A person can’t help their birth.” — Rosalind in W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848);[25] quoted from the OED by Curzan in Gender Shifts in the History of English.[26]
“Now nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing” — Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866);[27] quoted in Fowler’s.[24]
“Nobody in their senses would give sixpence on the strength of a promissory note of the kind.” — Bagehot, The Liberal Magazine (1910);[28] quoted in Fowler’s.[29]”
* Additional examples, NOT presented chronologically:
“‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech.” — Shakespeare, Hamlet (1599)
“Every one must judge according to their own feelings.” — Lord Byron, Werner (1823),[44] quoted as “Every one must judge of [sic] their own feelings.”[45]
“Had the Doctor been contented to take my dining tables as any body in their senses would have done …” — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814);[46][45]
“If the part deserve any comment, every considering Christian will make it to themselves as they go …” — Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor (1816);[47][45]
“Every person’s happiness depends in part upon the respect they meet in the world …” — William Paley[48][45]
*
“In the 14th edition (1993) of The Chicago Manual of Style, the University of Chicago Press explicitly recommended using singular they and their, noting a “revival” of this usage and citing “its venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare.”[106]
#
Like, spending literally one minute on the internet to confirm (or in this case, disprove) what you blindly *believed* was an actually fact would have saved you from embarrassing yourself in front of…how many notes does this post have now? Well, let’s just call it a staggeringly large number of people.
But at least you provided the internet with a valuable teaching moment.
