On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Dave Newt wrote:
wrote:
On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:03:01 +0100, "Clive D. W. Feather"
wrote:
Number One Son gets fivers out of the machine at his university.
Now this is something that many people say that really winds me up it
ISN'T HIS university at all saying "the university he attends would be
more accurate"
Is English your first language? That seems a little excessively
pedantic.
That's an interesting way of spelling 'completely wrong'.
The OED, on the various subtly different uses of 'his':
"Also used with objects which are not one's property, but which one ought
to have, or has specially to deal with (e.g. to kill his man, to gain his
blue), or which are the common possession of a class, in which every one
is assumed to have his share (e.g. he knows his Bible, his Homer, his
Hudibras, he has forgotten his Greek, his arithmetic, etc.)."
Interestingly, the earliest quotation they have for this sense is from
1709, rather later than the 9th-century first uses for the other major
senses. I wonder if this is an artefact of quotation, or a real change in
usage, and if so, how this relation was expressed before the change.
Cross-posting to alt.usage.english to see if anyone knows!
tom
--
One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department
of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears
in its greatest simplicity. -- Josiah Willard Gibbs