by Alan Townend17. Reflections
In Greek mythology Narcissus looked into the water of the pool and
saw his own reflection. In other words he saw himself — he saw a
reflection of himself. Both those words that I have highlighted are
called reflexive pronouns and in both cases the subject and the
object are the same just like the reflection of Narcissus. But we'll
come back to that later. Let's do some more reflecting or thinking. A
reflection, apart from being another picture of someone or something
as in the case of our Greek friend, who incidentally died gazing at his
reflection in the pool, is also another word for a considered thought
or coming back to think about something again. If you are writing an
account of your childhood for example and you are thinking back to
that time, you could call this description; «Reflections of my
childhood.» Again if you think that crime occurs because of the type
of society in which people live, you could say that «The increase in
crime in cities is a sad reflection of the poor conditions in which some
people live.» In these examples you can see that one thing is a sort
of representation of another. In fact the older spelling of «reflection»
was «reflexion» and we also find «reflective» and «reflexive». The
former means «thinking seriously about» — you can be described as
«in a reflective mood« when you are deep in thought about has
happened. The latter of course brings us back to the pronoun.
Let me show the forms of the reflexive pronoun in tabular form using
the same sentence:
I saw myself on the TV news last night. You saw yourself on the TV news last night. He saw himself on the TV news last night. She saw herself on the TV news last night. It saw itself on the TV news last night. (Let's imagine the «it»
here refers to the dog!) We saw ourselves on the TV news last night. You saw yourselves (plural) on the TV news last night. They saw themselves on the TV news last night.Two points to note in particular: «you» as a personal pronoun does
not change when it becomes plural but it does in the reflexive
pronoun: the spelling of the third person plural — themselves.
Take a look at these two sentences, both of which contain the word
«himself» but in each sentence the word has a different meaning:
Narcissus himself saw it in the water.
Narcissus saw himself in the water.
In the second sentence the meaning is that Narcissus saw a