"have ever been"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 12, 2006, at 7:37 PM, Troy wrote:

> Hmm - interesting.
> My instinct is that Wilson is on to something.
> THere's something about that McCarthy quote that has
> filtered down through pop-culture and may be
> influencing such formulations.

if the HUAC quote is the source, then uses of "ever" 'always' should
be in examples that resemble the original, as my examples did.  my
examples were collected on the basis of the original radio example,
because that allowed me to narrow the search to something
manageable.  <"have ever been"> gets over six million raw webhits and
<"has ever been"> gets almost ten million, most of them of other uses
of "ever".

<"I have ever thought that">  (not resembling the HUAC quote) gets
about 580 hits, heavy on archaic uses, occurrences in negative
polarity contexts, occurrences with universals, and writing by non-
native speakers.  in the first hundred hits i found only one that
looked relevant:

-----

My familiarity with HTML and ability to use command-line FTP has
served me infinitely well at my new job. My talents were wasted
before. Wasted!

I’m using these things because I’ve been introduced to ArcIMS. I have
ever thought that if I decided to get more training, it should be in
that. I.M.S. stands for Internet […]

http://www.aubreyrhea.com/journal/?m=200508

-----

just one, but it looks pretty good.  i don't have the time to do
other such searches, but that's what would be required to check out
the HUAC hypothesis.

(i have a hunch that universal "ever" is tied to tense and aspect --
that, for example, "I ever thought that math was hard" as an
alternative to "I always thought that math was hard" is much less
likely than "I have ever thought that math is hard" as an alternative
to "I have always thought that math is hard".)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org