The cliff of all of us
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An adventure in layered possessives, courtesy of Christopher Buckley, "No One Likes a Deficit Bore", The Atlantic, 9/20/2010:
Michael and our fellow commentators seem to go back and forth on the matter of whose deficit is it, anyway? Good arguments are made on both sides. But they're beside the point. The more pressing question is: Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All ours.
All ours? That seems wrong to me, if Mr. Buckley means, in effect, that the cliff is the responsibility of all of us. My unreflecting reaction is that it ought to be "all of ours", which on reflection makes sense if the sense is supposed to be that the cliff is "[all of us]'s".
(But maybe he meant "the cliff is all ours", i.e. it's completely ours, with no other claimants.)
This is a curious little corner of English grammar. For example, it seems reasonably idiomatic to answer "Whose is this?" with "All of ours", meaning that it belongs to all of us. But "Some of ours", meaning that it belongs to some of us, or "a few of ours", meaning that it belongs to a few of us, or "most of ours", meaning that it belongs to most of us, all seem problematic.
This is probably all straightened out somewhere in CGEL, and its historical development has probably been documented in detail by one of David Denison's students, and the geographical and social distribution of variants has probably been covered at some point in Language Variation and Change. But I don't have time to look it all up this morning.
[Note that (some?) y'all varieties of English have "all y'all" and therefore "all y'all's". For (some?) y'all speakers, then, the end of the quoted passage could have been rephrased (of course with a different take on whose responsibility it is) as:
Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: y'all's. All y'all's.
And by analogy, it's plausible that some people would have "all us" and "all us's" = "all ours" instead of "all of us" etc.
Perhaps similarly, though "all us" (meaning "all of us") is completely impossible for me, "all us Americans" (meaning "all of us Americans") is OK, at least informally, and things like "all you Canadians" seem fine in all registers. Strange.]
Mark P said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:20 am
It does seem ambiguous. The most "right" sounding interpretation is that it's completely ours (like a miser sifting gold coins through his fingers – 'Mine! All mine!") But in context it seems like he means that the cliff is the responsibility of all of us.
Yuval said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:31 am
Well, in the oblique you could say "it was us all", so I would suspect "the deficit is ours all" to be the preferred statement. But it obviously isn't.
Yuval said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:32 am
Of course, that wasn't an example for Oblique. But you catch my drift, don't you?
Karen said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:37 am
I think I'd switch to pure "of- genitive" midway through the answer: I do think "it's ours. All of us / It's ours, well, some/most of us."
But "all of ours" sounds better than "most of ours" , which seems to mean more "most of what belongs to us" rather "belonging to most of us".
BobH said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:39 am
When I first read it I thought it unambiguously meant "completely ours". I think you may be right that it's intended to have the "all of us" interpretation, but it didn't occur to me until you brought it up.
Twitter Trackbacks for Language Log » The cliff of all of us [upenn.edu] on Topsy.com said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:41 am
[…] Language Log » The cliff of all of us languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2645 – view page – cached An adventure in layered possessives, courtesy of Christopher Buckley, "No One Likes a Deficit Bore", The Atlantic, 9/20/2010: Tweets about this link […]
Ginger Yellow said,
September 21, 2010 @ 8:52 am
I'm inclined to agree with Mark P that the formation was used in analogy to "Mine! All mine!". And I'd suggest that the intended meaning is more "completely ours" than "all of ours". As in: nobody else has responsibility for it.
John said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:05 am
Makes perfect sense to me (Brooklyn born).
Personal possessives are hard, especially when mixed or modified.
Brett said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:09 am
I find it completely idiomatic. In speech, I probably use "all ours" less than "all of ours," and I can't say whether I would ever use it in writing, but I don't see anything wrong with it.
However, there is a phonetic difference between how I say the two phrases. In my idiolect, "our" can be homophonous with either "are" or "hour." In "all of ours," either pronunciation is possible, but in "all ours," only the first one is available.
Spell Me Jeff said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:24 am
So what do we do when the question and answer are expanded:
Whose cliff is this?
It is my cliff
It is our cliff
?It is all of our cliff
?It is all of ours cliff
?It is some of us cliff
D. Sky Onosson said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:27 am
Interesting. I have to concur with All of ours being (semi-)idiomatic, as when presented with ?Most of ours, my preference would be to produce Most of us's (I realize that form is probably dispreferred by many people outside of very casual contexts).
Ian Preston said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:32 am
As I read him, he is identifying himself as part of the Baby Boomer generation and therefore the 'ours' refers only to Boomers and can't possibly mean 'all of us' in a wider sense. He is saying that you can argue back and forth on the question of whether the deficit was caused by the Boomer generation or their parents but the responsibility for dealing with the mess falls entirely on the Baby Boomers (or their descendants). In other words, he is saying it's entirely his generation's problem to deal with.
Joe (same as above) said,
September 21, 2010 @ 9:43 am
I assumed he was trying to include both sense at once: it's "all of ours" (so stop arguing about whose it is) but also "all ours," as in the responsibility is ours, all ours).
BNC has some hits for "all ours" meaning "all of ours" by the way:
"Got any puppies going cheap? " he asked. " No, " said the shopkeeper, " all ours go woof!"
JL said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:07 am
I think the problem may somehow be that 'cliff' is singular, so that, somewhat paradoxically, the ambiguity one expects is absent.
Compare: Whose friends are they?
— Mine
— Some of ours.
— Ours. All ours.
That sounds OK to me: coherent, if a bit terse. In the second answer, if only a few of them were our friends, one would say, "Some of them are ours", and the third answer is modeled after the second.
But with, "Whose friend is he?
— Mine.
— Some of ours.
— All ours.
The last two sound off. Perhaps because one expects to try to parse whether "all" refers to to the friend(s) or the people being asked, which in the second case is unnecessary.
It is, I grant, counterintuitive to think that a linguistic phenomenon can sound wrong because it lacks ambiguity. But then, it's early in the morning, and this is just the way it seems to me…
Pflaumbaum said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:14 am
@ D. Sky Onosson
Apart from small children I don't think I've ever heard anyone say us's, nor for that matter me's, you's, him's or them's (with 's as a possessive rather than a contraction of 'is'). Are you sure you'd say that ahead of 'most of ours'?
Though I have seen "X and I's" and "X and he's", on the net.
backofbeyond said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:17 am
ISTMT "all ours" translates as "ours alone, nobody else's" while "all of ours" translates as "belonging to all of us, each and every one".
outeast said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:38 am
Shouldn't they be more worried about who is driving off the cliff, or possibly whose car it is they're driving? The question of cliff ownership seems to make for a rather muddled metaphor to my mind. But eh, whatevs.
iching said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:47 am
To convey the presumed meaning, I would have rewritten the following:
Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All ours.
like this:
Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All of us.
Hmmm, it doesn't have the same rhetorical oomph of the original does it?
By the way, at least in speech, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at all of us's either. There are plenty of hits on Google, and
here are some examples from Google books.
JL said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:50 am
Let me point out, too, that this might be less jarring in spoken form, or with some typographical help, at least as far as the ambiguity about whether the all referred to "all of us" or "all of the cliff", and perhaps with the elision of the "of", too.
"Whose cliff is it we're driving off? Ours. All ours".
That doesn't look quite as hinky to me.
Amy Stoller said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:57 am
Whose cliff is this?
Ours. It belongs to all of us.
iching said,
September 21, 2010 @ 11:20 am
The most sensible and grammatical suggestion yet, Amy :)
Coby Lubliner said,
September 21, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
How about "Ours. Of us all" (as in "the mother/father of us all")?
I don't think that "All of our mother/father" would work.
Jonathon said,
September 21, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
It seems to me that Buckley was adhering to a prescription against "all of" but took it a little too far.
Nathan Myers said,
September 21, 2010 @ 3:43 pm
outeast has it right. The reason it's muddled is that, as usual, muddling is the whole purpose of the piece.
Buckley knows that the cliff isn't the problem. Cliffs are just there. The problem is that somebody pointed the car we're all in at the cliff. He seeks to persuade us to put that somebody back in the driver seat. The only way he can achieve that is to distract us from who that somebody was, and is.
Rubrick said,
September 21, 2010 @ 5:07 pm
All our cliff are belong to us.
Nijma said,
September 21, 2010 @ 5:26 pm
I don't want the cliff, and I'm giving it to you. It's all yours.
Pflaumbaum said,
September 21, 2010 @ 5:59 pm
Thomas Pynchon saw the cliff coming. Or at least, a cliff. Or at least, something nasty up ahead…
'Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity – most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time… Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide…'
Jerry Friedman said,
September 21, 2010 @ 6:12 pm
By analogy with an American second-person-plural possessive, it should be all our guys's.
Carl Burke said,
September 21, 2010 @ 7:42 pm
Maybe he meant 'all ours' as '[the cliff] of all of us', but I just can't scope it that way. Not sure what kind of syntactic hoops I'd need to jump through to make 'all our X' mean '(all of the us) owning X' instead of '(all of the X) owned by us'. For me, 'Ours. All ours.' makes very clear that every bit of that cliff is owned by us, and nothing else.
Ralph Hickok said,
September 21, 2010 @ 7:49 pm
If I say, "It's all yours," I mean it's entirely yours, that is, it all belongs to you. I think "all ours" here is to be taken in the same way. It's completely ours, or all of it belongs to us.
Nijma said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:31 pm
It's the contemporary version of "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
iching said,
September 21, 2010 @ 10:51 pm
@Carl Burke:
Did you mean to say "…makes very clear that every bit of that cliff is owned by us, and nobody else"?.
iching said,
September 21, 2010 @ 11:01 pm
Please ignore my last comment. I think that was about an irrelevancy. Now I'm really confused.
But hang on, "that cliff is owned by us, and nothing else" doesn't mean that nobody else owns any of the cliff…or does it?
iching said,
September 21, 2010 @ 11:26 pm
My last comment was also irrelevant to the "all of us" vs "some of us" issue. I'll shut up now (to sighs of relief).
stephen said,
September 22, 2010 @ 8:30 am
Wallace Shawn was in four episodes of "Murphy Brown", where he portrayed a political commentator, I think. One of his annoying traits was that at the end of his commentaries, he would say,
"That's alls there is."
D. Sky Onosson said,
September 23, 2010 @ 9:10 pm
@ Pflaumbaum
I live in a region where I've definitely heard things such as "us's" and "you guys's" etc., and no doubt produced them myself. Like I say, it's definitely highly informal, but not the least bit uncommon.
Michaela said,
September 23, 2010 @ 9:20 pm
I'm most interested in this part of the post:
For (some?) y'all speakers, then, the end of the quoted passage could
have been rephrased (of course with a different take on
whose responsibility it is) as:
Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: y'all's. All y'all's.
In my experience of the use of this term in the Southern United States, "y'all" means "you people". It wouldn't be used as equivalent to an inclusive "us"; that would be "we all". So in that sense, the quote could be rewritten as "Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: We all's. All we all's"(meaning "every single one of us"). It may sound silly if you're not from the Deep South, but the original rendering would put the blame on a group separate from the speaker.
Thanks!
John said,
September 24, 2010 @ 10:42 pm
The correct answer is "China's."