Word: pronoun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...complained: "Our maid-of-all-work in [the profanity] department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah . . . Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon. Worse, it is frequently toned down to s.o.b. ... In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son-of-a-bitch, and each and every...
...durable stage hit Burlesque.* The old plot is still there, but the characters have been tidied up. The play treated burlesque as a pretty tough part of show business. In the movie, it is just more of the same old backstage life where actors occasionally misplace a pronoun...
...Port-au-Prince last week, peasants were singing: "Estimé, c'est bon papa; he makes his people step ahead." The pro-government papers printed flowery poems of praise, in which every pronoun referring to Estimé was capitalized. To at least one Haitian, that was carrying things too far. Snorted waggish Senator Alphonse Henríquez: "Another Christophe! Another Toussaint L'Ouverture! Another Jesus Christ! . . . Hell! A motor in a pair...
...made a promise, but, alas, failed to keep it. Under Letters (Feb. 28) you assured your readers that "pants will hereafter be taken off all ... pigeons" - a phrase which I interpreted as an assurance that adjectives, etc. would henceforth be safely attached to their logical noun or pronoun. However, by March 6, this masterpiece had been passed into print: "Sitting stiffly, but beautiful in tails . . . were Dmitri Shostakovich and his wife...
...fashioned pedagogues objected to that's me or it's him, because grammarians said that the pronoun after am or is also stands for the subject itself. They overlooked the fact that the authorized version of the Bible (Matthew 16:13) contains the question: 'Whom say ye that...