He also uses it following like, but not when, as often happens, he uses the word in place of as or as if. Thus he says "do it like him," but "do it like he does" and "she looks like she was sick." What appears here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun only, are not adverbs, but prepositions, and that they should have the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other prepositions have. Just as "the taller of we" would sound absurd to all of us, so "taller than he," to the unschooled American, sounds absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. "As her" was used by Swift, "than me" by Burke, and "than whom" by Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, "than him," is grammatically correct and logically necessary.[1] For example, compare "I love you more than him" and "I love you more than he." The first means "I love you more than (I love) him"; the second, "I love you more than he (loves you)." In the first him does not refer to I, which is nominative, but to you, which is objective, and so it is properly objective also. But the American, of course, uses him even when the preceding noun is in the nominative, save only when another verb follows the pronoun. Thus, he says, "I love you better than him," but "I love you better than he does."
In the matter of the reflexive pronouns the American vulgate exhibits forms which plainly show that it is the spirit of the language to regard self, not as an adjective, which it is historically, but as a noun. This confusion goes back to Anglo-Saxon days; it originated at a time when both the adjectives and the nouns were losing their old inflections. Such forms as Petrussylf (= Peter's self), Cristsylf (= Christ's self) and Icsylf (= I, self) then came into use, and along with them came combinations of self and the genitive, still surviving in hisself and theirselves (or theirself). Down to the sixteenth century these forms remained in perfectly good usage. "Each for his- self," for example, was written by Sir Philip Sidney, and is to be found in the dramatists of the time, though modern editors always change it to himself. How the dative pronoun got itself
- ↑ The King's English, p. 63.
