SPLASH or SLASH? [brass tacks]

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 23, 2007, at 10:54 AM, Doug Wilson wrote:

>>>> Nothing that early has been found in the UK, which casts the
>>>> rhyming-slang origin in serious doubt.
>>>
>>> Hmm, some sort of idiom blend?
>>>
>>> "cast doubt on X" + "put/place X in doubt" -> "cast X in doubt"
>>
>> it sounded perfectly ordinary to me, but then i googled, and {"cast *
>> in doubt"} is *tiny* vs. {"put * in doubt"} and {"place * in doubt"}.
>
> Seemed OK to me; still does, I guess.
>
> Try <<cast in doubt>> at Google Books: hundreds of instances, most of
> them pertinent at a glance, dating back to 1822 although maybe with
> some concentration recently.
>
> It seems that maybe it's rather frequently passive: "X is cast in
> doubt" etc. Plenty of active uses too though.

interesting case.  there's a small pattern here, with a few verbs
(put, place, throw) that are common in the pattern, plus one (cast)
that's much less common; the verbs are semantically similar.  what do
we conclude from this?

on the face of it, nothing.  there's no reason to think that the
infrequent item has some special status (in this case, that it can
occur in the pattern only as a result of a combination of this pattern
with another pattern involving all the items).

look at ditransitive transfer verbs.  "give" is by far the most
common, and the others decline in frequency to a tiny fraction of
"give".  in raw google webhits:

"give me that" 1,020,000
"hand me that" 81,800
"toss me that" 29,200
"throw me that" 9,330

we don't conclude from this enormous disparity that "throw" doesn't
really occur in this construction but turns up in the ditransitive
pattern only as a result of a combination of this pattern with the
prepositional-dative pattern, or as an ad hoc extension of the
ditransitive pattern to a semantically similar verb.  there's nothing
special about things like "throw me that ball".

a different sort of case.  look at the sentence-initial connective
"too", as in "Too, the Dutch emerged from the oil crisis with their
heads high" (NYT, cited by MWDEU).  MWDEU concludes: "No grammatical
objection can be made to it", but presumably because of its relative
rarity (as against the more common "moreover", "besides", "in
addition" and "also") it sounds peculiar to some people, and some
handbooks discourage it.

Bryan Garner, in particular, just hates it.  _Garner's Modern American
Usage_: "It is poor usage to begin a sentence with _too_ (= also),
although there is a tendency in facile journalism to use the word this
way."  He recommends "also" instead, but also lists "moreover",
"further", and "furthermore" as "serviceable" alternatives.  (why not
"besides" or "in addition"?)

(A characteristic Garner passage, combining an ex cathedra judgment
about a usage and a disparagement of the motives of those who use it.)

arnold

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