In article ,
(Mojo) wrote:

Maybe it's a Barclays thing. I got a crisp £5 out of a cashpoint
inside a Barclays in Birmingham this afternoon.

Our local Barclays has fivers in it's bricks, but only in store...

--
Paul Cummins
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"Tom Anderson" wrote in message
.li...
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!

Interesting, but I think it's an artefact of quotation - if anything at
all. That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.

--
Mike.



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filted:

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:39 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:


That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.

Mike I am not and wasn't after an argument here but has I said it
always riles me when I see and hear people saying this kind of thing
" HIS firm does this that and the other etc etc" wrong in my book it
should be the firm or company he works for does etc etc .

"My neighbor plays the drums"...there is no sense in which the drummer belongs
to me, but that's how the idiom works....r


--
"You got Schadenfreude on my Weltanschauung!"
"You got Weltanschauung in my Schadenfreude!"

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:17:06 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Clive D. W. Feather wrote:

In article , James Farrar
writes

The last HITW I knew that gave out fivers was at the Barclays at
Gloucester Road, but that stopped three or four years ago.

The ones in or near college bars are a good place to try. Number One Son
gets fivers out of the machine at his university.

Funny you should say that - the example i was thinking of was a Barclays
machine on Turl Street in Oxford, within stumbling distance of quite a few
pubs and bars, that does fivers. Or at least, did last time i used it,
which was admittedly quite a while ago.

The one at Gloucester Road, I think, gave them out because of its
proximity to IC.

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:37:39 +0100, wrote:

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:39 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:


That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.

Mike I am not and wasn't after an argument here but has I said it
always riles me when I see and hear people saying this kind of thing
" HIS firm does this that and the other etc etc" wrong in my book it
should be the firm or company he works for does etc etc .

Clavox, meet idiom.

On Apr 18, 12:37 pm, wrote:
On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:39 +0100, "Mike Lyle"

wrote:
That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.

Mike I am not and wasn't after an argument here but has I said it
always riles me when I see and hear people saying this kind of thing
" HIS firm does this that and the other etc etc" wrong in my book it
should be the firm or company he works for does etc etc .

What about "his friend" or "his sister"? What about "my God"? I
don't see anything you can substitute there, but they don't belong to
him.

The "possessive" pronouns have had meanings in addition to possession
since Anglo-Saxon. I had to look through /Beowulf/ longer than I
expected (they used possessives a lot less then, apparently), but line
262 has "min faeder", my father, and line 267 has "hlaford thinne",
thy lord. Neither his father nor his lord belongs to him.

So I think you can stop being riled. It's just how English has always
worked. Incidentally, the few other languages I know anything about
work the same way.

(Quotations 7-bitted from "Beowulf on Steorarume [Beowulf in
Cyberspace]", http://www.heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html.)

--
Jerry Friedman

wrote in message
...
On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:39 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:


That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which
aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even
if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the
slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.

Mike I am not and wasn't after an argument here but has I said it
always riles me when I see and hear people saying this kind of thing
" HIS firm does this that and the other etc etc" wrong in my book it
should be the firm or company he works for does etc etc .

Hi, Clavox. Arguments are what we often do round here (AUE) - usually
politely. You certainly don't have to use the form yourself, but it
equally certainly isn't wrong: grammatical possession isn't ownership in
the sense in which property is owned. See Ron's example with the
drummer: I really don't see how one can fault, or improve upon, the
Biblical "thy neighbour" or "[Jethro] went his way into his own land".

--
Mike.



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In alt.usage.english, wrote:
but to get back to the fivers I rang the BOE this afternoon
and as mentioned here the other day BOE have enough new notes to
replace every old note that is out there but they say banks are just
not asking for them and there is no way for us or BOE to make them.
What the guy at BOE did say more new notes would get into circulation
if only people would take any well worn notes into the banks instead
of just spending them in shops etc .

It's no good blaming the customers. The banks need to put the fivers in
their cash machines.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

On 18 Apr 2007, Mike Barnes wrote

In alt.usage.english, wrote:
but to get back to the fivers I rang the BOE this afternoon
and as mentioned here the other day BOE have enough new notes
to replace every old note that is out there but they say banks
are just not asking for them and there is no way for us or BOE
to make them. What the guy at BOE did say more new notes would
get into circulation if only people would take any well worn
notes into the banks instead of just spending them in shops etc
.

It's no good blaming the customers. The banks need to put the
fivers in their cash machines.

The banks will do this only if they're forced/coerced to do so by a
regulator. Indeed, this happened with tenners a few years back
when the banks pushed their luck by loading just twenties into the
machines.

The advantages of "just twenty pound notes" were obvious:

1. More cash is held in each machine; therfore less maintenance in
recharging.

2. Adjacent shops -- newsagents, corner stores -- would be asked to
cash lots of £20 notes.

3. Said shops needed a larger cash float.

4. Businesses pay for cash from the bank; it's not a free service.

Therefore -- for the bank -- it's money from both ends. (Less
maintenance, and more income from cash floats from nearby shops.)

The banks will not, by choice, load fivers into their ATMs; they
had to be coerced into keeping tenners in there.

--
Cheers, Harvey

Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed

wrote:

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:05:39 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:



That 1709+ sense isn't the "his university" one. Earlier in the
entry there are plenty of examples of "his" used for things which aren't
possessions. I think Clavox has the wrong end of the stick. And even if
he _has_ identified a change, it wouldn't be relevant in the slightest
to current formal English, in which "his school" etc are perfectly
idiomatic. If he doubts the validity of this attitude, ask him why he
isn't talking like the first line of OED's examples.


Mike I am not and wasn't after an argument here but has I said it
always riles me when I see and hear people saying this kind of thing
" HIS firm does this that and the other etc etc" wrong in my book it
should be the firm or company he works for does etc etc .

Get riled up over these things as much as you like, but don't tell
people what English SHOULD be like.

--
Rob Bannister