'All the protagonists'?

When I was young I liked to learn facts about language. I was also a smug little git so what I liked best of all was to learn a fact that would allow me to say to people 'You're using that word wrongly'.

I'm still a smug little git but now I know that this is prescriptivism and a Bad Thing. Linguists try to avoid it, and instead describe language usage As She Really Is. For this reason, I've decided to revisit a prescriptive usage that I remember learning as a small child. This was an extra-special one for me, because it involved knowing the  etymology of a word and applying it to modern usage, and this is always a good way to make people feel stupid. (What, you don't know classical Greek? You utter ignoramus.) Yeah, I was insufferable. 

Theirselves and meself

As you know, the paradigm of reflexive pronouns in English is as follows:

myself
yourself
himself/herself/itself
ourselves
yourselves
themselves

What I had never noticed until yesterday was that it's not logical. No surprise, we are talking about English, a language not known for its logicality (not that any languages are, particularly). But I'd never spotted the illogicality in this context before.

Eddie Izzard buys a cow in Old English

English is a Germanic language, so it's closely related to German, Dutch and varieties thereof. It's changed a lot over the years: it's got a lot of French/Latin vocabulary due to those pesky conquests, and its grammar has changed in various ways (loss of inflections, loss of case, word order changes). But Old English was much more like those German/Dutch varieties, and Friesian in particular. Of course Friesian has changed too, but not as much as English has.

So obviously Eddie Izzard is going there, armed with only a smattering of badly-pronounced Old English, to try to buy a brown cow. Why he wouldn't buy a Friesian cow (the 'classic' black and white ones) I don't know, but whatever. Anyway, he totally manages to talk to this Friesian farmer in Old English, and they understand each other. It's brilliant: