INGs

[Laurence Horn]

One more point on too-ing and fro-ing:  for many speakers/writers,
the idiom itself in its bare form is "too and fro".  There are 117K
hits for this, of which the first is a recasting of the age-old
question,

Do your balls hang low,
Can you swing them too and fro?
http://ask.metafilter.com/65459/Do-you-balls-hang-low-Can-you-swing-them-too-and-fro

And however one analyzes "to and fro" in such contexts, the
conversion presupposed by the gerund form makes it even weirder or
more arbitrary to treat a preposition like "to" as a verb or
whatever.  Not that adverbial "too" is any more transparent, but if
you're just guessing, it's not too surprising that you might come up
with "too and fro"/"too-ing and fro-ing" rather than "to and
fro"/"too-ing and fro-ing".

LH

At 10:52 AM -0500 1/13/09, Victor wrote:
>I have a tendency to be anal when it comes to certain kinds of analysis.
>When it comes to searches, I try to be exhaustive. So, when I came
>across an unfamiliar form of a familiar expression, I chose to dive in.
>The expression was simply too jarring for a [non-native] American ear
>and I was curious.
>
>In a Telegraph daily English soccer gossip bulletin (emailed), you can
>find [no link],
>-The Mirror, too, is full of possible *too-ings and fro-ings*.
>Manchester City have supposedly tried to bring Inter Milan striker
>Adriano to Eastlands in a swap deal with his compatriot Jo.
>
>I thought, at first, this was a one-off, but quickly discovered
>otherwise. This is what started the goose chase.
>
>Although Google shows 95000 raw hits for "too-ing", most are unrelated
>(and easily explicable). Still, there are quite a few. More precise
>"too-ing-and-fro-ing" gets 2660 raw hits (also 3790 raw for
>"tooing-and-froing", with nontrivial overlap). Of those where
>identification is possible, nearly all are of Australian or British
>origin, which explains my unfamiliarity with the expression (I was
>familiar with the base "to and fro"). I may have come across the
>specific expression before, but hadn't notice it.
>

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