I'm sitting in the RHC at the moment. i was just a moment ago accosting a grad student with a book called "Sold America" to see if perhaps she'd be interested in borrowing some of my books, since i 'just happen' to have some similar ones - 'Selling Mrs Consumer" and "Consuming Kids." Then, during this exchange, i overheard a fellow RHC patron ask another "can you unplug me?"
he was, of course, referring to the power supply cord to his laptop - three connectors removed from his person and yet in the contemporary vernacular a completely legitimate use of the accusative pronominal form. sorry. didn't mean to get all obfuscative on your collective asses, but ... well, temptation abounds in word play.
anyway. it just pinged my brain in a couple places (oh - and there's another interesting aberration, using ping to get someone's attention. byron pinged me via email - as in that was the subject of an email he sent when i didn't respond in quite the timely fashion - and i had just similarly sent a semantic ping to someone who wasn't responding in a chat. maybe that's a techie thing though...), but returning to my brain, hearing the expression raised my interest first on the linguistic level and then on the popCulture/popPsychological level.
On the one hand it's interesting that we can use such an extreme grammatical variation without feeling some sense of thought-incompleteness - consider: "can you unplug that cord for me?" ; "can you unplug the cord to my laptop" ; or even "can you please unplug my laptop?" versus "can you unplug me?" All the others indicate ownership secondarily, accurately representing the object of the requested action as something close to the physical object of the action. (we are not actually unplugged in this request; the power cord is. and even though this request came from a guy; it was clear he wasn't talking about having the other party wrap her hand 'round and tug at anything attached to his body)
i can't explain it well, but it's not just an odd extension of what constitutes one's person semantically; it's correspondingly odd syntactically for having reduced what generally requires either an additional modifier attached to the action's objects to a structure that has no object modifiers. it's completely reductive; there is no lingering reference to the original object under question. and it's not really as usual as it might seem. when i tried to think of other cases, none was so dramatic in substituting owner for object. like "hit me up..." or "hit me" there is usually some kind of object class being given to the user -erm i mean the speaker... - another card, another beer, another (actually those are the only two i can think of) - but it's still ending directly with the user in a way that is not the case when the substituted object is a possession of technological form. these two, for instance would be rendered explicitly along the lines of "hand me another beer," "give me another card." For both the implicit and explicit varieties the case is the same here. It's the genitive case which in english can drop the preposition when placed be for the direct object (ie give me ___ vs give ___ to me). The same cannot be said for unplug me. aha. i've figured it out. in fact, this aberration represents the expansion of this rule to 'for.' So y'all - if you think of any idioms with implied 'to's and 'for's (not to be confused with 'two by fours'), comment them will ya? muchos danke
thats all. i just think it's amusing, and yet telling, that we've come to so lackadaisically refer to our possessions as legitimate extensions of our selves.
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