I'm a neon-fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about the strange and fascinating history of an abbreviation you've probably

never thought too much about.

And then we'll talk about an interesting use of the subjunctive in Neil Gaiman's book,

American Gods.

Most of us are familiar with the abbreviated form EM standing in for a third person plural

pronoun in the expression, go get them.

We can often be heard saying something like this in our casual speech, for instance.

I'll pick them up or got a love on them.

Because it's so similar in meaning to the modern pronoun them, it's very reasonable

to assume that this M is simply the result of our tendency to shorten things.

In other words, chopping the TH sound off them, reasonable perhaps, but surprisingly wrong.

The actual etymological source for M is found in the original Old English pronoun system.

In contrast, the modern pronoun them comes from the old Norse borrowing they M, which

itself was the data form of the old Norse pronoun they.

Both of which are spelled with a letter we don't use in English anymore that's called

a thorn and kind of looks like a lowercase P.

The same Scandinavian Norse pronoun is what developed into the modern English they.

Before they, though there was HEM, a third person plural pronominal form that predated

these old Norse borrowings in the history of English.

If you want to get technical, HEM was the accusative plural of the old English pronoun he spelled

...