Pedants' Paradise

[french frank]

Sens de la queue helpfully translated Meaning of the queue.

[Serial_Apologist]

Isn't there a Dali painting title, something like "Desir attrape par la queue", presumably meaning customer's payment held-up in Ikea?

[vinteuil]

Yes!

Here's something from the café at Nice airport: Sens de la queue helpfully translated Meaning of the queue.

... perhaps just as well they didn't try to translate 'queue'...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XtiHc_-KdOUC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=queue+french+penis&source=bl&ots=1Se4RMyJAR&sig=RAno22JBLFD4K6zv1NPtLi9uVcw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDMQ6AEwA2oVChMImJGDr5yIyAIVx9YaCh3OTgHL#v=onepage&q=queue%20french%20penis&f=false

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Isn't there a Dali painting title, something like "Desir attrape par la queue", presumably meaning customer's payment held-up in Ikea?

A Picasso play, no less!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_Caught_by_the_Tail

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... perhaps just as well they didn't try to translate 'queue'...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0penis&f=false

!!!

... mightier than the sword?

[Beef Oven!]

I never get this....... "because he had himself "

As in......

"The jury was not told that a fourth suspected killer, Wojciech Ryniak, was not in the dock because he had himself been murdered during another robbery in Oxfordshire earlier this year."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-34616077

[ahinton]

I never get this....... "because he had himself "

As in......

"The jury was not told that a fourth suspected killer, Wojciech Ryniak, was not in the dock because he had himself been murdered during another robbery in Oxfordshire earlier this year."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-b...herts-34616077

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

[ahinton]

!!!

... mightier than the sword?

Nice one! - though I'd not fully apprecaied the nature of your bedtime reading until now! But what a typically academic-sounding post-modernist-generator-inspired title Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature is, with its inevitable and perceivedly indispensable colon that I find to be just one of so many examples of what I call "colonic irritation"! That said, I'll probaly be unable not to remember this the next time I hear "you are position 1 in the queue" when holding on the phone...

[jean]

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

I don't think either is at all unclear. It's not as if the reporter had written he had had himself murdrered.

The two main functions of these -self pronouns are reflexive, and emphatic.

[Pabmusic]

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

Quite agree. 'Himself' qualifies 'he' and is there for emphasis, to reinforce 'he', so it would be better next to 'he'.

[gurnemanz]

Quite agree. 'Himself' qualifies 'he' and is there for emphasis, to reinforce 'he', so it would be better next to 'he'.

The original quote is OK, as others have said, because it used to reinforce a noun or pronoun. Confusion often seems to occur when someone doesn't realise that as a pronoun in its own right it is used not as as a reinforcer but reflexively, ie to refer back to the subject of the sentence, either as the object (he hurt himself) or after a preposition (she works for herself). It can't be used for emphasis as in something like: You can give it to myself, or even more tiresomely as the subject: My colleague and myself will attend the meeting.

[gurnemanz]

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

[french frank]

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

Where's that 'Doh!' emoticon …

[Pulcinella]

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

Sadly, some people seem to use such expressions as they think they avoid the I/me dilemma (not that it is a dilemma!).

[french frank]

Sadly, some people seem to use such expressions as they think they avoid the I/me dilemma (not that it is a dilemma!).

Generational? I would automatically have used the form 'How my wife and I met'. The younger set would go towards 'me and my wife'. Why on earth anyone feels it necessary to resort to 'myself and my wife' I don't know. No necessity to emphasise that it wasn't anyone else [unspecified] meeting my wife. (A future employer? A next door neighbour? The local yoga teacher?)