Nevertheless, as is "him", "himself" is a pronoun, albeit reflexive.
True. But what is your point?
My point, perhaps confusingly phrased, was that reflexivity is incorrect in "remembered his mother telling [3rd person pronoun] and his brouther", because it's the mother telling him, not he telling himself.
"Himself" could also be emphatic, as in:
"He did it himself," or "Who would enter at that very moment but myself?"
I don't think emphasis works either, here, though this a bit more debatable.
Bufty said:
A periodic flick through its pages can remind one of things that have perhaps slipped from one's mind -if they were ever there at all - as evidenced by a scan of the SYW Forum.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. That texts get better with the EoS-treatment?
Actually, I'm not sure that the things EoS reminds people of are actually in the book and not just in people's minds. For instance, either White or Angell weakened what Strunk said in the original about "active/passive voice" by the simple act of example-substitution.
Strunk
writes:
Strunk said:
Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.
One of the example pairs:
"The sound of the falls could still be heard." // "The sound of the falls still reached our ears."
This was later replaced by:
"At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard." // "The cock's crow came with dawn." (I don't currently have any later editions available, so could anyone check whether I made a mistake here?)
Now, notice this:
"Reached our ears" is "a transitive in the active voice", the thing that Strunk means to demonstrate. "Came with dawn", on the other hand, is an intransitive with an adjunct. This means that in later editions this example does not illustrate what Strunk is saying, but something more losely related to this.
Now, since Strunk never explained in the first place what he was on about in this section (the quote above is the only occurrance of "transitive" in the entire rule) I'm left unsure what the entire rule is supposed to mean.
Notice that other examples in there are: "There were ... leaves lying on the ground." This is not an example of passive voice, so Strunk's "Use the active voice," is somewhat broader than "Don't use the passive voice". It would be interesting to know what Strunk would have thought about "intransitive verbs" (verbs that take no object), but he's - misleadingly - focussing on the active-passive distinction.
Basically, the reader is left to figure out the meaning on his own; and - to my mind - later editors got it wrong with the "cock" example. It's a cock up.
(I love bad puns.)
Almost all the book is that vague. It's more rough than a guideline. It's really more of a bible, reinforcing what you already know in your heart, leaving everyone who disagrees with you a heretic.
A
good booklet would have tried to help you understand the "rules" in question, but Strunk really only used his rules as a bludgeon of authority. (He was a teacher; the "helping understand" would have taken place in the classroom, I suspect. It's White's hero-worship that messed things up: the
Elements of Style without Strunk is a desouled booklet.)
Finally, you'll notice how the sentence that decries "could be heard" contains an equivalent construction: "can be made lively and emphatic". How are we supposed to deal with that. I agree dpaterson: it's a rough guide, not a bible. I disagree with people who claim Strunk is a hypocrite.
But it
is a flaw in the composition of the booklet, I find. The meta structure (what is in the book, what isn't, and how it's written) suggests that we're on our own when it comes to applying the "rules"; but the "rules" are written with authority. The effect of this is:
I, the teacher, am the authority. I know how to break my rules. You, the students, are supposed to respect my authority. You best adhere to the rules, unless you prove that you can break the rules. I'm not going to help you get there. You'll have to do it yourself.
This wasn't necessarily Strunk's position, mind you. I'm actually guessing it's the removal of the class-room situation that causes that effect. (I'd probably still disagree with Strunk about some stylistic choices being bad, but that could be productive.)
To my mind, the things that reading S&W reminds you off are vague dogma; and I get that impression precisely from perusing online critique pages (including SYW). I suppose there's a difference of perception at work (and no: "I suppose a difference of perception is at work," would
not be better, here.
)
[Sorry, I've been biting my tongue while lurking in 
