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<div>At 2:11 PM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
Well, it's only a speculation off the top of my head, and I am not
trying<br>
to sell it too strongly. However ...<br>
<br>
(1) "I don't give ...": In my own experience, the likely
choices include "a<br>
damn" (plus euphemisms "a darn" etc.), "a
shit", "two shits", "a f*ck", "a<br>
rat's ass", "a hoot", "two hoots", etc. All
rude, except for "hoot" .... I<br>
don't hear "a jot", "a tittle", "a
peep", "a squeak", etc., in this<br>
expression. I think there's some tendency to want a rude expression
here,<br>
rather than a diminutive or an animal sound.<br>
<br>
[Incidentally, "not give a damn" is thought by some to
derive from "not<br>
give a dam", a dam being a small unit of currency in India. Is
this<br>
derivation legitimate, or is it an elevated type of 'folk
etymology'?]<br>
<br>
(2) I think "fout[re]" is closer to "hoot[er]"
than other things such as<br>
"jot" are. [But perhaps I'm influenced by Japanese, where
'fu' and 'hu' are<br>
absolutely identical (with bilabial 'f') ... Does bilabial 'f' occur
in<br>
some varieties of French, BTW?]<br>
<br>
(3) "F*ck all" is not analogous word-for-word, but it's
another example of<br>
the popular desire for a rude word in a certain context. "He
doesn't know<br>
..." (intensive) is filled (in my experience) by
"shit" ("diddly",<br>
"doodly", "squat", "beans" euphemisms
for this, I think), "f*ck all"<br>
(occasionally "f*ck" alone), "bugger all", etc.
Perhaps "zilch", "zip" are<br>
exceptions, perhaps partly euphemisms.<br>
<br>
For those sensitive individuals who object not only to rude words but
also<br>
to their transparent euphemisms, 'hoot' might be the only polite way
to<br>
fill "I don't give a ..." -- perhaps because 'foutre' is no
longer<br>
recognizable to the average English-speaker, so that 'hoot' is no
longer</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>recognized as its alteration or
euphemism.<br>
</blockquote>
<div>OK, I'm open to persuasion. But I thought we were talking
about how these expressions evolved rather than which expressions are
likely to be uttered today, so the evidence I was alluding to is
germane. This discussion is reproduced from my 1989 book, _A
Natural History of Negation_, p. 400:</div>
<div>===============</div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1"
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>Minimizers, those 'partially stereotyped equivalents of<i>
any' </i> (Bolinger 1972: 121; cf. 6.4 above), occur within the
scope of a negation as a way of reinforcing that negation. As
far back as Pott (1857: 410), linguists have recognized this function
of positive expressions denoting small or negligeable quantities,
often incorporating a sense of scorn or ridicule, which Pott sees as
implicitly evoking the formula <i> nicht einmal das</i> 'not
even...'; cf. also Schmerling 1971, Horn 1971, Fauconnier 1975a,b,
Heim 1984. Impressive, though hardly exhaustive, inventories of
NPI minimizers specialized for this function are given by Pott (1857:
410-11) and Wagenaar (1930: 74-5). Their examples--from
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Old Spanish, Italian, English, Dutch,
German, and Slavic--include minimal quantities from the culinary
domain (= 'not a cherrystone, a chestnut, a crumb, an egg, a fava, a
fig, a garlic, a grain, a leek, an oyster, a parsnip, a pea,...'),
coins of little value (='not a dinero, sou,...' [cf. not a red cent,
plugged nickel, thin dime]), animals and body parts (='not a cat's
tail, a hair, a mosquito, a lobster[!], a sparrow'), and other
objects of little value and/or salience (='not an accent , an atom, a
nail, a pinecone, a point, a shred, a splinter, a straw').
Indeed, it would appear that<u> any</u> entity whose extension is
small enough to be regarded as atomic in an accessible set of
contexts can be used productively in this frame as a means of
negative reinforcement.</font></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1"
color="#000000"><x-tab>
</x-tab>Nor is this tendency by any means restricted to
Indo-European. Negative-polarity minimizers occur as negation
strengtheners in Basque (cf. Lafitte 1962), in Japanese (cf. McGloin
1976: 397-419), and in many other languages.</font></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1"
color="#000000">===============</font></div>
<div>Now the syntactic frame will narrow down the class of possible
fillers, so that "not worth ___" will differ from "not
give (a) _____", which will differ from "not care (a)
_____", which will differ from "not know ___ about",
but it should be noted that it's not only or even primarily
obscenities that occur here. In fact, the standard French
negative markers "PAS", "RIEN", etc. originated
in just this way ('I didn't walk a step', as in Eng. 'I didn't sleep
a wink'). The class of squatitives you mention--(diddly) squat,
shit, fuck-all, zip, zilch--are in some ways the modern English
analogues of Fr. PAS. Incidentally, Dutch is even more creative than
English in its invocation of negative polarity drecatives, allowing
for colloquial sentences translating literally as<font face="Times"
color="#000000"> 'Nobody understood a
{scrotum/ball/hole/testicle/sodomite/dev<span
></span>il} of it', as Gertjan Postma has discussed.</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I'm still not convinced about the "foutre" >
"hoot(er)" move, though, especially since the alternation
of the initial consonants is less plausible in English and French
than in Japanese.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>larry</div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
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