"have ever been"

[Wilson Gray]

"Are you now or have you ever been...?" perhaps?

-Wilson

On 9/12/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      "have ever been"
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>
> caught in passing on the radio on sunday, a woman talking about her
> enthusiasm for Star Trek: "I am, and have ever been,..."
>
> this struck me as literary/archaic, and the OED agrees with that
> judgment, treating the relevant uses of "ever" -- 'throughout all
> time' and 'always' -- as "now arch. or merely literary", with the
> most recent cites being from 1831 and 1885, respectively.
>
> googling on <"I am, and have ever been"> pulls up 19 hits, some from
> archaizing prose, but a few from more ordinary contexts:
>
> 1. Ged Naughton, UK: "I am and have ever been a fan of Newcastle
> United. That's why sport taught me disappointment."
> www.entwicklung-und-sport.de/ssc_newsl_120606.html
>
> 2. I am, and have ever been, a fan of this movie.
> www.moviepoopshoot.com/tv/75.html
>
> the remaining hits are mostly of "ever" in the context of a
> universal, "all" or "everything":
>
> 3. Now all jokes aside..he is just one of those people who make me
> feel really shitty about everything i am and have ever been and will
> ever be.
> hooray-for-being-me.blog.ca/2006/06/
>
> 4. All that I am and have ever been the river has known. It is the
> map I follow back to understand what has shaped me: ...
> www.class.uidaho.edu/english/Banks/alycia_shedd.htm
>
> here "all" is not itself universalizing; rather it conveys something
> like 'at some time', the meaning "ever" has in negative,
> interrogative, comparative, and superlative contexts.
>
> googling on the alternative order <"I am, and ever have been"> gets
> 29 hits, all except one from before the 20th century, or in
> archaizing fiction, or in the context of a universal.  but this one
> looks good:
>
> 5. I am, and ever have been an avid supporter of the separation of
> church and state, no matter what religion.
> www.atsnn.com/story/199566.html
>
> <"I am, and will ever be"> gets more good hits.  the usage isn't easy
> to search for, in any case.
>
> possibly those who use "ever" 'always' (the radio speaker and the
> writers of 1, 2, and 5) see it as more formal and emphatic than
> "always".  here's a quote where that motive seems pretty clear; the
> writer reformulates a clause, replacing "always" with "ever", to make
> it more emphatic:
>
> 6. As a Singaporean I have been told that I am and will always be,
> regardless of the rhetoric, that I am and will ever be a second-class
> citizen.
> www.yawningbread.org/apdx_2004/imp-167.htm
>
> or maybe some people are just treating "ever" as a shorter variant of
> "forever".
>
> or, of course, it could be a survival of the old universalizing
> "ever", perhaps only in a few phrases.  (is there a well-known
> quotation that might have served as the model?)
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
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>


--
-Wilson
----
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

--Sam Clemens

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