¡Bemsha SWING!

5 abr 2008

I heard on an NPR newscast yesterday: "HIllary Clinton released tax returns for she and former president Clinton."

The classic hypercorrection. Nominative pronouns sound more formal. We are taught not to write "Him and me don't get along so good." So "for she" sounds more correct than the more natural (and grammatical) "for her." To avoid a grammatical mistake you make a grammatical mistake, since the correct form sounds too informal, somehow. People who go around saying "it is I" don't trust their own grammatical instincts as native speakers. Imagine you're looking at a police line up. You identify the subject. What do you say: "That's him" or "*That is he"? Only a misguided urge to be more "correct" leads to the second option.

But for some reason in compound nounphrases there is more tolerance either way. "For my father and I,... " That sounds almost ok. Nobody says "For I..." in place of "for me." Nobody says "Me went to the store," even though almost everyone says "Me and my dad went to the store."

"My family and I live in..." that sounds good. But not "*I and my family..." "*I and you have to talk" = ungrammatical. It has to be "You and I" or, colloquially, "Me and you."

So the hypercorrection "For she and the president" is the mirror image of the use of me, him, her, them, as nominative pronouns in longer noun phrases in colloquial speech.

2 comentarios:

Kasey Mohammad dijo...: Of course, the difference between "it is I" (or "it is he, she, etc.") and "for she and Clinton" is that the former is right, whereas the latter is a clear error. Whether one is "misguided" in choosing the correctness of the former has more to do with decorum than grammar. For instance, you probably wouldn't want to say "it is I" in a cell full of lifers.; 12:28 p. m.
CLAY BANES dijo...: I made the mistake in boot camp with a substitute drill sergeant, when asked whether I was wearing my government-issued eyeglasses, of answering, "Sir, these are they!" (I used to talk like that in those days.) It did not kill me. It was misguided, and I felt immediately self-crushed by my error. This was an intimate conversation, our faces a hand apart. Kind of like intelligent bloggers who never learnt the difference between "a while" and "awhile."; 12:58 p. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

5 abr 2008

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