May 22, 2021

"My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I, 'Well, it was like that for me, so it’s going to be like that for you.'"

"Harry said. One of his most traumatic moments as a child, Harry said, was when he followed his mother’s horse-drawn casket in a public funeral cortege at age 12, passing throngs of onlookers, many of them openly sobbing — and staring at him. 'The thing I remember the most was the sound of the horses’ hoofs going along the Mall,' Harry told Winfrey. 'It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me. [I was] showing one-tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing: This was my mum — you never even met her,' he said."

From "Prince Harry tells Oprah Winfrey of his excessive drinking and drug use — and says the royal family made him 'suffer' as a child" (WaPo).

AND: With all respect to Harry's suffering, well described in that passage, I do wish he'd have said: "My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and me...." Notice he used "me" when "William and" wasn't interposed between the subject "My father"/"he" and the first-person pronoun. He said "My father used to say to me" but then lost his grammatical way after he saw the need to include William: "he used to say to both William and I." 

This sort of error — an error of over-correction — usually seems to be caused by insecurity about one's education. You have the urge to say it the way that is actually right, but you don't trust yourself and you also don't understand the grammatical rule, so you reach for something that feels more elegant — "I" rather than "me." Could Harry possibly feel that he needs to strain to be elegant? Maybe he does. What's the point of being royal if you don't feel royal? 

And I guess that's the point of absconding to America.

1 comment:

Ann Althouse said...

Kate writes:

"If I could pour one piece of information into Millennial and GenZ brains it would be this: Everyone suffers. No, I didn't follow my mother's casket through a public funeral. That is a terrible experience and I pity him. I also didn't learn to ride and play polo, or live in a castle. Our triumphs and sorrows are different and relative, but we all have our little luxuries and our deeply felt pains. I wish the younger generations could find comfort in knowing they're not special, at least not in that way. We all have our war stories that impacted us. Why are they so determined to make a drama? Perhaps we all need to prove victimhood now, today's required bona fide. It's making them so unhappy, though."