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detect falsities and blunders, is half the grammarian's duty. The pronouns of which the term self or selves forms a part, are used, not for the connecting of different clauses of a sentence, but for the purpose of emphatic distinction in the sense. In calling them "relatives," Churchill is wrong, even by his own showing. They have not the characteristics which he himself ascribes to relatives; but are compound personal pronouns, and nothing else. He is also manifestly wrong in asserting, that they are severally "the same in all three cases." From the very nature of their composition, the possessive case is alike impossible to them all. To express ownership with emphasis or distinction, we employ neither these compounds nor any others; but always use the simple possessives with the separate adjective _own_: as, "With my own eyes,"--"By thy own confession,"--"To his own house,"--"For her own father,"--"By its own weight,"--"To save our own lives,"--"For your own sake,"--"In their own cause."
OBS. 28.--The phrases, _my own, thy own, his own_, and so forth, Dr. Perley, in his little Grammar, has improperly converted by the hyphen into compound words: calling them the possessive forms of _myself, thyself, himself_, and so forth; as if one set of compounds could constitute the possessive case of an other! And again, as if the making of eight new pronouns for two great nations, were as slight a feat, as the inserting of so many hyphens! The word own, anciently written owen, is an _adjective_; from an old form of the perfect participle of the verb _to owe_; which verb, according to Lowth and others, once signified to possess. It is equivalent to _due, proper_, or _peculiar_; and, in its present use as an adjective, it stands nowhere else than between the possessive case and the name of the thing possessed; as, "The Boy's Own Book,"--"Christ's own words,"--"Solomon's ow