Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Hisself, My Son, and a Thought About Prescriptivism:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_17-2009_05_23.shtml#1243057125
My five-and-a-half-year-old used this word a few days ago, and I
gently corrected him. We say "himself," I said, not "hisself." I'm a
descriptivist when it comes to determining what is "correct"; but I
want my child to learn not just any correct way of speaking, but the
way that is going to best help him get ahead in life, which sometimes
mean the mode of speaking that is most satisfying to self-described
"purists." Plus even a descriptivist treats deviations from standard
usage as errors, at least in contexts where standard usage is expected
(as opposed to, for instance, when one is consciously trying to speak
a particular dialect). A Google search reveals that "himself" is
nearly 100 times more common than "hisself," so I'm happy to say that
"himself" is the standard term and "hisself" is nonstandard.
But of course I also wanted my boy to get a sense of the patterns in
the language, so I pointed out the analogies -- "herself,"
"themselves," "myself." Wait a minute! It's "myself," not "meself,"
and "ourselves," not "usselves"; the first-person reflexive uses the
possessive ("my" and "our") followed by "self" or "selves." But the
others use the objective ("him," "her," "them") and not the
possessive.
And what is it that tells us that "myself" and "himself" are right,
while "meself" and "hisself" are wrong? Not any supposed inner logic
of the language, it seems to me, but simply usage: "Myself" and
"himself" are standard among educated English speakers, at least
outside narrow regional dialects, and "meself" and "hisself" are not.
What is right to say in English is what educated English speakers say.
So when I hear prescriptivists argue using what I think of as "logical
prescriptivism" -- this spelling or usage is right and that is wrong
because of some inner logic of the word, or because of an analogy to
other words -- I remember examples like this. Or I remember how
"aren't I right?" is right and "amn't I right?" is at least extremely
unusual; or how "it's" as a possessive of "it" remains nonstandard in
educated edited prose, even though for non-pronouns this is exactly
how possessives are formed.
To be sure, logic and analogy have their uses in language. They can
sometimes be good mnemonics. They can sometimes be good guides to what
will come across as confusing, or will arouse the wrong associations.
They can be good guides when creating new terms, and trying to make
them clear and normal-looking. But when usage conflicts with the
supposed logic of the language, usage prevails. If it didn't, we'd be
saying "hisself" and "myself," or "himself" and "meself."
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