Whose mine?

The first instance of this peculiar abuse I encoutered was a beginner’s piano book. Not the one from which I myself learned the notes and keys – decently titled First Piano Book (Het eerste pianoboek, by Jan Bouws). Its abusive competitor was My First Piano Book (Mijn eerste pianoboek), by somebody calling himself Folk Dean.

Whose book is Folk’s? Folk’s, of course. Not mine or yours.

Despite, or thanks to its irritating title Folk’s (actually Theo’s) book seems to have been a commercial success. Its pronominal abuse (My first …) may have been fashionable on the pedogogical market when it first came out in 1957. But it truly boomed after Windows 95 put My Computer onto your desktop. Nowadays there is hardly a commercial or public website which does not have a corner reserved for you not called yours but mine. It feels both idiotic and intrusive – them using my word for what’s supposed to belong to me.

If you say I and I say I
you mean you, but I mean me.

Indexicals – those words that change meaning depending on who’s using them, or where, or when – are sophisticated and disconcerting. They subvert the desire, instinctive and infantile, for a stable relation between word and object.

And that’s maybe the main reason why this abuse of the possessive pronoun is so annoying – it addresses me (and you) as an infantile kind of person, a halfwit without powers of generalisation, a toddler for whom all mine is mine, as mother can only mean one mother: its own, not anybody’s female parent.

It even reaches down into my private parts (and yours). Chilling.