Isaac buys him a prism

I say things like “I need to buy me some new shoes” fairly often.  This marks me as being a native of  the American South.   This construction  was recently discussed extensively in the article On beyond personal datives? in the Language Log.  Some of the commenters quoted examples that were far more elaborate than anything I would say, but I am a rather diluted Southerner.  (I’ll cry me a river because I have lost me most of my heritage.)

I was charmed recently to discover that a certain Physicist was in spirit a fellow Southerner.  In a paper by Isaac Newton in the Philosophical Transactions in 1671, he wrote:

Sir: To perform my late promise to you, I shall without further ceremony acquaint you, that in the beginning of the Year 1666 (at which time I applyed my self to the grinding of Optick glasses of other figures than Spherical,) I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme, to try therewith the celebrated Phoenomena of Colours.

Later on he wrote

…that the difference ‘twixt the length of the Image, and diameter of the hole, through which the light was transmitted, was proportionable to their distance.

I think he has been channeling Pogo, who is also a Southerner.

I recommend looking at his paper.  I didn’t realize what an excellent science writer he was.

By the way, I thought I remembered that Newton’s trip to buy a prism was described in one of the volumes of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, but a search of Google Books doesn’t reveal it.

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3 thoughts on “Isaac buys him a prism”

  1. If I’m not mistaken, the first English wave of migration to the South came not too many years after Newton, so the Southern accent probably does sound very much like 1700’s English accent did.

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