Wednesday, April 25, 2007

In which I take a position

Last night, while doing the important thing I was doing, I used a construction (in bold below) that a few found puzzling:

You whom with I played baseball and ate bubble gum and talked about Shakespeare think this crap is clever.

I swore up and down I'd heard it before, but google wasn't really any help. Apparently, I was making shit up. Sort of.

The sage and totally fuckable teofilo advised me that this kind of construction is called a postposition and exists in several other languages. Some examples from Navajo he sent along:

naalyehe ya sidahi
merchandise for one who sits
"trader" (lit. "one who sits for the sake of the merchandise")

naalyehe ba hooghan
merchandise for house
"trading post" (lit. "house for merchandise")

Really cool, right? I thought so. And it gave me full confidence that I should be encouraging the use of my new construction—it just rings so mellifluously in my ears.

So: go ahead. Use "whom with." Use other postpositions. You'll be yourself beside. And sure, wolfson will probably make fun of you, but that was likely to happen anyway, you know?

1 Comments:

Blogger Ben W said...

Face it, Stanley: you stand outwith all known norms of English.

26/4/07 1:10 AM  

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