"have ever been"

[Greg Pulliam]

In "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," doesn't the
dying Spock say to Kirk something like "I am now,
and ever have been, your friend"?  This could be
why a fan might have chosen to use a similar
structure.

Greg



>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: ²I am and have ever been a fan of Newcastle
>United. That¹s why sport taught me disappointment.²
>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)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


--
-
Greg

http://www.pulliam.org

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