Onhwy61,
I thought that you had specifically read "this hobby", which to me is slightly different than saying "our hobby." I was certainly not suggesting you had picked up a George-ism.
I admit the passage you quoted, from "King Richard II" is one of the all-time great usages of the word "this" in a monologue. I remember it very clearly from high school English. My English teacher was quite the dramatician. I actually remembered that monologue when I started seeing "this X" crop up in public speech/soundbite form because it was very specifically "this country" which I heard so many times - and that made me think of Shakespeare's paean to England as a country apart from other countries, which suffered the everlasting misfortune to not be England.
I have a sneaking suspicion George Dubya did not pick it up while watching the RSC, though perhaps his speechwriter did. It is possible that it is a Texas-ism I had not previously recognized which wandered into speech patterns. I still think the change in usage has been remarkable. I view it as being part and parcel of a popular move towards an 'empathetic construction' of the English language.
Certain small events or triggers - seemingly insignificant at the time - change linguistic usage forever. How many threads have you seen start with "So...", or "Okay." These are also products of the past 10 years. Interestingly enough, I think they are connected with the "this X" because all three of them are signals of empathy; the speaker is trying to identify common ground with the listener. Starting sentences with "So" and "Okay" is, as far as I can tell, a manifestation of the decline of the spoken paragraph. It is meant to connect what is about to be said to something which might have come before but did not. I think both (starting with "so" and starting with "Okay...") signal an increasing lack of confidence in social speaking, similar to the almost ubiquitous use of a rising intonation in sentences, making a lot of what comes out of teenagers mouths sound like questions. How many of you have heard the following while standing in line at Starbucks? - "Okay, so, I was going to go shopping with Melissa on Saturday but she couldn't go? [rising intonation, sounding like a question, probably elicits a nod] And so I called Julie to ask her if she wanted to hang out? [rising intonation, another nod] And so we went to the mall and we were just hanging out (and we saw this really great dress), and like you'll NEVER guess who we saw there!" Michael Lewis pointed out a few years ago that "so" as a start of a sentence came from Silicon Valley, and I can imagine that the "so" start is an effort to "pick up where we left off before" which is so innate in the conversation of coders/multitaskers ("so, where were we? Ah yes, I remember...")
In the end, language is a living breathing thing. Personally, I am substantially less bothered by the linguistic issues of using "this X" as an empathetic construction than I am bothered by the shortcut of conversational construction implied in the use of "so" and "okay" as sentence starters. The art of conversational silence has long gone, and the art of speaking in paragraphs is rapidly disappearing. I suppose all this signals I am a linguistic snob. Okay, so maybe this language thing is like, well, you know... I mean whatever...
Blindjim,
You're right. Don't forget to mark the mailbox with chalk.
