I said earlier that none of the style guides I consulted have anything to say about using “on behalf of” in conjunction with both a third person and a reflexive reference to the speaker or writer. But failing that, I would go with “On behalf of my wife and myself, I persuaded…” On our behalf, I persuaded the witless bank manager to supply us with a detailed floor plan of the vault room so that we could make efficient plans to “refinish the floor.” If “my wife” reenters the picture, we face an unappealing choice between “on my wife’s and my behalf” and “on my and my wife’s behalf”—neither of which draws any matches in a Google Books search—and may perhaps also get a sneaking suspicion that “behalves” might sound better than “behalf” unless the interests of the speaker and his wife are not absolutely identical. Unmistakably, daman game online “on my own behalf” is a much more popular construction in the Google Books database than “on behalf of myself,” “on behalf of me,” or “on behalf of I.” Unfortunately, with a compound referent, “on my behalf” becomes exceedingly awkward. As a reflexive form, “on behalf of myself” seems to be far more common than “on behalf of me.”
- This is just a bit of idle musing, but are the two meanings of this word somehow related via the American & Canadian holidays?
- Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.
- Nowadays, my brother refers to his evening meal as ‘dinner’; I still refer to it as ‘tea’.
- Whether it takes place at noon or in the evening is mostly a cultural thing.
- My sister thanks God every day for insert reason to thank God here.
(English usage in the South of England, or sometimes, more particularly the South-East, is generally taken to be “correct” English, as in this case.) Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
- The use of Christmas Eve for the whole day created a difficulty for those who wanted to refer specifically to the evening.
- On the ancient Jewish calendar, the day went from sunset to sunset.
- In fact, the Google Books searches I ran turned up just three examples of “on behalf of me” used reflexively.
- Cigars and Brandy is a time mostly for men after a dinner and is surely a southern term not used much at all anymore.
“…the house of our neighbor’s” vs. “…the house of our neighbors’ ”
This silence leads me to believe that style guides generally agree that the same rules that apply to reflexive constructions by a speaker with other introductory phrases would also apply here. If you are talking on behalf of you and someone else what is the correct usage? I can say that I have never heard “insurance” pronounced with the accent on the first syllable until I moved to Indpls, IN..
Answers 3
On behalf of everyone here, may I wish you a very happy retirement. The object in each case is the object of the preposition in or on, which means you would use the prepositional case for pronouns (you would never say “On behalf of my wife and I”). To my mind, the return of “my wife” to the mix torpedoes the “on my behalf” option, simply because “on my and my wife’s or my wife’s and my behalf” isn’t something that most people speaking or writing in English would be willing to say or commit to paper. The net effect of the three charts presented in this part of my answer is to support the notion that, in “of” clauses in English, “my wife” generally precedes “myself” or “I” and more often than not precedes “me. It also provides a fairly strong argument for dismissing “on behalf of I and my wife” from further consideration—as indeed the OP seems to have done at the outset.
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Thanksgiving Eve has now been seen in the wild, and even Halloween Eve to mean October 30th, which seems to go by the name of Devil’s Night in some circles. Indeed, Anton Chekov wrote a story with the title Easter Eve about the night before Easter. Just when I thought I was catching on to all the Christmas traditions, I hear the phrase “Christmas Eve eve” or “the eve of Christmas Eve.” When did that sneak in, and what the heck does it mean? One also reads of Christmas Eve Eve, with two eves. The last example can be used for all holidays, “Wish you a happy thanksgiving.” or “Wish you a happy Memorial Day.”
Since that’s a prepositional clause “of pronoun” and reflexive, you want “On behalf of my wife and myself, I express our extreme displeasure.” Webster’s 3rd New International Dictionary says behalf is “used with in or on and with a possessive noun or pronoun.” That means “behalf” is always the target of a possessive. “On behalf of myself” can’t be corrected in the same way, for “on behalf of me” actually sounds worse. An airline pilot announced, “On behalf of myself, I want to thank you …” …
Correctness of “Thank you for your time and looking forward to your response.” closed
However, if you said ‘…at our neighbours’ house’, the apostrophe goes at the end if more than one person lives there, or before the ‘s’ if the neighbour lives alone. We had Thanksgiving dinner at the house of our neighbors. Also, this could not be a slogan to attract Western farmers, as farmers usually did not take their meals with them into the fields. To add some more to the subject, in 1900 the Republican Party(US) ran the campaign slogan “Four years more and the full dinner pail.’ Brunch became known as a combination late breakfast/early lunch.
“Lunch” vs. “dinner” vs. “supper” — times and meanings?
For a generic term, I don’t think there is an improvement upon morrow, other than to stick with the day after. In most Western Church traditions Christmas Day is the First Day of Christmas and the Twelfth Day falls on 5 January, but for others, the twelve days begin on 26 December and end on 6 January. As per the Twelve Days of Christmas, the day after Christmas Day is the Second Day of Christmas for most churches. Nor for that matter is eve other than as preserved in “Christmas Eve” and the like and figurative uses like “eve of destruction”. Is there a word that can be used to concisely say “the day after Christmas”, such as “I disposed of my Christmas tree on Christmas XXXX”?
Rooted in the word “to sup”, it comes, again, from farming traditions — many farming families would have a pot of soup cooking throughout the day, and would eat it in the evening — specifically, they would “sup” the soup. For instance, many people who grew up in the American South and/or on farms traditionally ate larger meals at noontime to give them the strength to keep working through the afternoon. Is there a particular difference between dinner and supper, or a circumstance where lunch becomes dinner? According to this event listing not all these events are “trots” (which are runs), nor are they all on the Thursday. When the context is not sufficient for the purpose (as may be the case in weather forecasts), one, however, needs to be more explicit about intending to refer to the evening.
(That’s the only holidays I can think of where we do this. Nobody talks about “Fourth of July Eve” or “Veterans Day Eve”. Maybe there are other examples.) The night before New Years, that is, December 31, is New Years Eve. When Christians borrowed holidays from the Jews, they borrowed this idea of the holiday starting at sunset. That is, sunset marked the beginning of a new day. On the ancient Jewish calendar, the day went from sunset to sunset.
Breakfast – Morning meal breaking the overnight fast. This seems to me to explain why supper has survived in some rural areas, as those people would be in contact with the fewest number of people that speak differently. Later the Northerners brought their style of saying “breakfast”, “lunch”, “dinner”, in that order.
Not to disagree with any of the previous answers, but I am surprised that no one has mentioned that “dinner” can have two meanings. She was greeted with “Mrs Sherry, so pleased to meet you, I have been dying to meet the only parent who writes ‘lunch money’ on the envelope containing dinner money.” When I checked the original meaning of the word “luncheon” it seems the original Oxford defined it as a small meal between two larger meal. Dinner – Largest, most formal end-of-day meal. Morning Tea – tea and biscuit, sometimes a replacement for Afternoon Tea for those who dislike caffeine so close to bed time.
This is a common question in my ESL email writing classes. “I thank you for your time and am looking forward to your response.” “Thank you for your time and looking forward to your response.” I think that this issue would, however, go mostly unnoticed in a colloquial conversation.
Whether it takes place at noon or in the evening is mostly a cultural thing. Dinner is considered to be the “main” or largest meal of the day. If not, you may request us to develop a tutorial. I can only guess that a “turkey walk” is a toned-down version of a “turkey trot”, which is a short (usually 5 kilometers) running race held on the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. It is therefore most likely that this was a walk “close to the Thanksgiving holiday”, probably in the thanksgiving “spirit” (meaning decorations included cornucopias, Pilgrims’s hats, squash and pumpkins, corn eaves, and lots of turkeys). I once read that a “turkey walk” was going to be held on a Sunday at 8.00 a.m.
When they arrive home in the evening they are so tired that they eat a light lunch before retiring to bed (apologies for not being able to provide a direct quote at this moment). I wonder what time of day that meal took place? For supper in the evening after we came in from the field about dark we would eat mostly beans and cornbread.
Cigars and Brandy is a time mostly for men after a dinner and is surely a southern term not used much at all anymore. Dinner is a more formal term for the end of the day meal which usually includes the accompanying of friends, a date, business partners, or persons other than just family and usually included cocktails prior to the meal. Supper is the main meal for a family at end of the day. The meal in the morning was always breakfast. Canadians use both “dinner” and “supper,” I think. With this in mind, would it be incorrect to say that one enjoyed a turkey dinner for supper?
Where I live (SE-US), supper is more likely to connotate a quiet family meal, whereas dinner is just like lunch only later. Maybe Sunday dinner is if you have to spend the time after church preparing the meal, and brunch is if you go out afterwards. So whether you use lunch/dinner or dinner/supper is heavily determined by when your culture traditionally has its largest meal.
