Self words

Reading a book on the 1992 chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, I came across this sentence: “Twenty years ago, to the very day, Fischer had swept to victory, to become crowned as the 11th World Champion, against the self-same Spassky, then the Soviet World Champion.”

I put the book aside for a minute pondering the word self-same. I knew what the word meant, but I couldn’t recall seeing it in print before, and I’ve never used the word. I must have come across it at some point, or I wouldn’t have known what it meant. But it stood out to me. What not just write the same?

The book in question was written by a British author, so I asked a British friend if the word was more common in British English than in American. He thought it was. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, self-same occurs about once in every two million words, so it’s not too common, though it’s attested as early as the fifteenth century and was even sometimes used as a noun. In its adjective sense, the OED defines it as “the very same, the identical, exactly the same.”

A clue suggested itself in the OED gloss. Perhaps self-same carries the nuance of exactness whereas plain old same doesn’t. To say that someone wore “the very same outfit” (or “the very same expression”) could imply an exactness not present in “the same outfit” or “the same expression.” Or perhaps self-same is a poetical intensive, as in this line from Tennyson: “Pray, Alice, pray, my own sweet wife, That we may die the self-same day.”

I still haven’t figured out the difference between same and self-same to my satisfaction, but my rumination reinforced my interest in other self-words.

The most common ones are self pronouns, which usually have a reflexive use (“The children enjoyed themselves”) or an intensive one (“The queen herself presented the award”). In their reflexive and intensive uses, –self combines with either the possessive or objective form of a personal pronoun: myself, yourself, ourselves, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, oneself, themselves, and nowadays singular themself. Reflexives also show up in the so-called middle construction (“These cars sell themselves”) where the meaning is that the cars sell easily. And there are also a handful of verbal idioms that almost always require reflexive pronouns as their objects: to avail yourself of, to concern yourself with, to resign yourself to, and so on. You can absent yourself or perjure yourself, but not someone else.

The pronoun uses are the most common, but there are other ways self is used. Standing alone, self can be a noun referring to an individual’s behavior (her true self) or condition (my old self) or to the entirety of awareness and values (the concept of self). And self- combines very freely with nouns (self-control, self-defense, self-awareness, self-satisfaction) and adjectives (self-adjusting, self-starting, self-defeating, self-motivated). The reflexive meaning is apparent in such compounds.

Self- seems somewhat reluctant to combine with verbs, as opposed to nouns and adjectives. When it does, I’ve noticed a tendency to add in a redundant reflexive object. You might have come across phrases like to self-control themselves, to self-manage themselves, to self-govern themselves, to self-pity themselves, to self-promote themselves. (Feel free to Google them).

These forms hurt my ear a bit, because of the repetition of self. Yet they are not uncommon, and perhaps built on the model of avail oneself, concern oneself, resign oneself, and the other verbs that require reflexive objects. It’s impossible to self-pity someone else, just as it’s impossible to perjure someone else.

I guess we could say these self-verbs show the very same redundancy as the adjective self-same. Or perhaps just the same redundancy.

_{Featured image by Ian Talmacs via Unsplash.}