Possessive Form in Lists

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ricardo. I’m calling from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Well, welcome, Ricardo. What’s up?

Hi, Ricardo. Welcome to the program.

Well, my question is about the use of the second person possesses.

This is something I’ve noticed repeatedly, but it’s sort of come to my attention more recently.

I hear it when people are, often when they’re listing things.

We’re having our kitchen redone, for example,

And it struck me when we went to go talk to the guy who’s doing our cabinets.

He was telling us about the different woods that we could use.

And he said, you got your cherries and you got your maples and you got your walnuts.

And so that use of the second person possessive, it’s not something that I would ever use.

But I hear it often, and I don’t know if it’s a regional thing, if it’s a class thing, what the story is behind it.

I know what you’re talking about, Ricardo.

I encountered this recently in the Curious George Christmas special.

What?

Oh, really?

My son was watching, yeah, A Very Monkey Christmas, I believe it was called.

You’ll find it on PBS.

And in there, there’s a scene where Bill, who’s a young, he’s like a teenage boy, is manning this Christmas tree lot.

And at some point, he feels obligated to explain all the trees.

And he does it exactly like that.

It’s something along the lines of, you got your pines, and you got your cedars, and you got your short pines, and you got your hard pines.

And he does go through the shtick.

And it’s very much, it’s not just that they’re listing things. It’s that they’re teaching. They’re telling you. They’re like inventorying something that you need to know in order to make a decision.

Right, exactly, yeah.

When you Google this in a variety of databases and books, you’ll find that almost always there’s an element of teaching there or an element of explanation. It’s that person A knows the list and person B does not know any of the list. And person A is going to dump it all in one shot, and that’s how they do it.

Yeah.

But as far as the your, which you called second person possessive, I think what we’re talking about here is just a very informal, it’s kind of the mirror image of one. Or you might say one has one’s softwoods, one has one’s cherry, one has one’s maple, right?

Right.

But that sounds stuffy and pretentious. But how do you really get across the idea that it’s like those woods don’t belong to the guy who’s speaking really and they don’t belong to you because you’re a customer and they’re just kind of like they exist.

Right.

So by saying you got your hardwoods and you got your maple and you got your oak and your pine and your what have you, you’re kind of just saying they exist. It’s just a way of being kind of indirect and inspecific.

But do you guys think it’s so much the language of educating somebody is the language of sales? I mean, I’m hard-pressed to think of somebody saying, like a science teacher saying, you got your kingdom, you got your phylum, you got your class, you got your order, you got your family, you got your genus, you got your species.

I’m a teacher myself, and it never occurs to me to use that.

I’ll tell you, when I Google it, though, I do see people using it to explain things about they’re often I hate to say this.

And it’s not always the case, but it seemed to be frequently the case that when I look at the data that I can gather, it’s people who have some bias against against many groups of other kinds of people.

And then they list them in this fashion, which leads me to believe that there is a class issue here, an education issue, that it might be the kind of thing that you’re not going to hear a president or a queen say.

The Pope is not going to inventory his cardinals and go, you know, he’s not going to list them one by one.

You got your gluttony.

You got your sloth.

You got your blood.

He’s not going to, yeah, right.

So it’s a kind of, it’s definitely highly informal and probably highly correlated with poor education.

Okay.

I don’t know.

What do you think?

I’m just basing it on a sussing out of the data that I can gather from a variety of public sources, including books, blog posts, Usenet posts, just all the kinds of stuff, just different levels of discourse.

You don’t find this in the highest levels of discourse.

You do not find this in science books.

You don’t find it in treatises about world economics.

You don’t find this in people talking about relationships.

You find this in books that are talking about really mundane, ordinary stuff.

Ricardo, what do you think?

Well, you know, whenever I run into it, it’s usually, you know, like, for example, not only does my cabinet guy use it, but my contractor uses it.

So it is something to me that sounds kind of like a blue-collar construction, you know?

Okay.

A tradesman, maybe?

But, you know, I’m also, you know, I live in a part of the country where I didn’t grow up, really, so I was wondering if it might also be a regional thing, if it’s a rural thing or a southern thing or anything like that.

If it is, I don’t know a thing about it.

We welcome data from our listeners, though, if it’s the kind of thing that you grew up with or you use yourself.

And probably some emails saying, I’m not uneducated and I use it.

And that’s fine, too.

Go ahead and send those emails and make those calls.

We welcome those as well.

Okay, great.

Well, I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye, Ricardo.

Thanks.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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