Always-inquisitive reader Mahin Pouryaghma asks about the compound construction “this here”. It’s one she sometimes encounters in her home stomping ground of rural Georgia.
Thanks, Mahin, for affording me a chance to reflect on this and similar expressions.
I’m treating this one as a single word for reasons I explained in the article on “compound”. In practice, it’s spoken and thought of as expressing a single notion.
“This here” is an expression I grew up with. I heard it constantly throughout my childhood and youth. It’s deeply engrained in various dialects, including those of southern Appalachia. These are my cultural roots.
Pondering my relationship with those roots, I experience wildly mixed feelings. Many speech patterns I heard (and sometimes used) are flatly wrong. Others are merely quaint. Being a voracious reader, I tended to speak and write — even then — according to the norms of Planet Bookworm.
Norms are, of course, in the eyes of the beholder. (Or in this case, the ears of the hearer.) My speech sounded normal to me, but not to most of the good folks around me. To them, I sounded snooty and pretentious. They “didn’t much cotton to book-larnin’”.
The real problem, I now realize, is that many of my friends and relatives saw me as ashamed of my roots. In other words, ashamed of them. That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now! All the best parts of me came directly from that culture. I own it proudly.
But back to “this here”:
Some of the expressions I heard and learned growing up made me cringe. “This here” never was one of them. I’m not sure why this one doesn’t grate on my nerves, like some of the others. My advice, however, is unambiguous:
Please, don’t use it!
“This here” is closely associated, in mainstream American and British literary culture, with a lack of education and proper breeding. Rightly or wrongly, it’s thought of as backwoods farmhand talk, low-class cowboy talk, or inner-city jive talk.
These judgments may be unduly harsh. Or maybe not! Either way, they are the reality. If we don’t want to be tarred and feathered by public perception, then “this here” is an expression we need to leave at the door.
That said — I would not say “this here” is grammatically incorrect. It can be argued that the “here” is a way of accentuating or emphasizing the “this”. It’s shorthand, in other words, for: “This thing — this one, right here, the one I’m indicating, as opposed to that other one — is what I’m talking about.”
When I say this “can be argued”, I’m not really endorsing the argument. It’s simply one I’ve read. I don’t really agree with it.
In my circles, growing up, “this here” was rarely used for emphasis. It wasn’t shorthand for anything. It was just a needlessly wordy way of saying “this”.
More than ninety percent of the time it would have been easier to say “this is such-and-such” rather than “this here is such-and-such”.
The expression “this here” has a close cousin: “that there”. No need to go into it, as it seems self-explanatory — and all the same thoughts apply.
(This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)