At a recent memorial service for Aaron Swartz, Alan Grayson (U.S. Congressman from Florida) gave an eloquent eulogy, which began like this:
Aaron worked in my office as an intern, and had a quality that I found unnerving, which is that he could come up with better things for him to do than I could come up with for him to do.
And time and time again, I would give him something to do, and he'd say, "Is it OK if I also work on this other thing", and this other thing turned out to be much more important than anything I could come up with. And I learned to live with that.
I learned to live with that shortcoming, which I took to be a shortcoming of my own, not one of his.
The other unnerving quality that I found in him was the fact that when he would conjure these assignments, they actually came to fruition — an unusual phenomenon here on Capitol Hill. He'd give himself something to do, I recognized that it was very worthwhile, I let him do it, and it got done!
He was a remarkable human being.
Midway through his remarks, Congressman Grayson used a striking turn of phrase (emphasis added):
And who lost, out of that? Well, Alan Turing lost. But so did all of we. We lost as well. All of us who would have benefited from that first, and second, and third Nobel Prizes that Alan Turing had in him. And that Aaron Swartz had in him.
At least, reader DF found it striking enough to send me a link.
The standard pattern is
So did they.
So did we.
because they or we is the subject of did, but
So did all of them.
So did all of us.
because them or us is the object of of.
And indeed, Mr. Grayson uses "all of us" just four words later. If it weren't for that, I'd be inclined to think that he's taking "all of" to be a sort of compound quantifier rather than a construction involving an embedded prepositional phrase.
Perhaps this is related to the processes that lead people towards uncertainty about which pronoun forms to use in coordinate structures.
(Full transcript, video)
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