Did I hear what I think I heard?

No, I did NOT just hear that?

Yes, for sure I did!

I heard a public speaker today, in front of 1000 people, say something that was unfathomable in the not-so-distant past.  I had read this kind of thing in a textbook once about 20 years ago, so I should not have been so totally surprised.  But, it's not that common yet.  I have only heard this kind of utterance about 4 times in the last 20 years.

The text book I read 20 years ago used an example of some people's dialect changing the accepted form of a possessive phrase.  The example was to replace the pronoun her with a more identifying phrase.  To do that, a person thinks first of the phrase like The woman who lives down the street.  A person would next place the noun being possessed after the identifying phrase, in this case, dog.  Finally, the person places a possessive punctuation mark, an apostrophe at the end of the phrase to show that the whole identifying phrase shows possession of the dog, that is, the woman who lives down the street's dog.  That's a big mouthful to say, but it's certainly one way of having a possessive phrase.  It's such a mouthful, in fact, that it is seldom used.

Now about that public speaker.  He used the pronoun we to begin the sentence.  The natural and long-standing way to form the possessive of first person plural is to change we to our. However, the speaker wanted to further identify the two groups making up we, so he used you and I for emphasis of the two elements.  The more standard form of We brought our lives (the phrase he used) was changed to We brought you and I's life.  I was paying only casual attention to what was being said to that point.  But, when I heard the possessive phrase, I had to look full-faced at the speaker to see if he was trying to make a joke.  No, he wasn't after checking facial expressions and noticing the pacing was the same as what had been uttered before.

Amazing!!  He was a young man of 25 with a bachelor's degree, having grown up in a university town.  So, it wasn't as if he had come from the Appalachian outback area of the country.  I know; It's a language principle that any generation can change anything it wants to about the language it uses as a group.  It happens all the time.  Very effectively and consistently the generation of those below 40 have changed the subject pronoun use when using two pronouns as a subject of a verb, such as, Me and him went to Pittsburgh  in the place of  He and I went to Pittsburgh.  The politeness rule of putting a third person pronoun in front of the first person pronoun has also been retracted in favor of speaker first and third person second.  So, when it comes to using a possessive phrase instead of a single pronoun, I know that it can be done any way speakers want to.  I just wasn't ready for it.  And to me it would be an outrageous change if such a change were to take root and spread.  But, every generation has its day in the sun to live how they want, speak how they want.

Maybe it will take another 10 years to take root.  Then, I will have heard the phrase more times, and in that repetiveness I will be better able to accept something that now carries a huge stigma.