"only ever"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I still don't get it but I know when I'm beat.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "only ever"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 8:26 AM -0800 11/26/04, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Of the late creator of the strip "Peanuts," Jonathan Franzen writes
>in the New Yorker for Nov. 29,
>
> Schulz only ever wanted to be a cartoonist. (82)
>
>I judge this sentence to be semantically weird. Natural and normal would be
>
> All Schulz ever wanted to be was a cartoonist.
>
> or
>
> Schulz wanted only to be a cartoonist.
>
> or
>
> A cartoonist! Yessirree, Bob, that's the only thing
>Schulz ever wanted to be!
>
>Anymore, is the New Yorker losing its celebrated sensitivity to
>English? Its old-time persnickety copy-editors used to would have
>forstalled something like this.
>
>Or have I slipped over, finally, into the curmudgeon column?
>
I won't try to answer that last one, but after first claiming in
print that "only ever" is a Briticism, I've started to accumulate
many examples from U.S. English. If you google on "over ever done it
once", for example, you're directed to 394 hits. I'm not sure why it
would be considered "incorrect"--stilted, perhaps, but not incorrect.
In general, "only" licenses negative polarity items like "ever" as
long as the latter are not the focus of "only", as seen below
[examples taken from a 1996 paper of mine], so the "only ever" in
examples like Franzen's is actually quite well-behaved.

(1) a. I only eat any meat WHEN I'M DEPRESSED.
b. I eat meat only WHEN I'M DEPRESSED ABOUT {SOMETHING/ ?*ANYTHING}.
c. Only WHEN I'M DEPRESSED do I ever eat any meat.
d. *Only WHEN I'M EVER DEPRESSED ABOUT ANYTHING do I eat meat.

(2) a. I've only ever gone there ONCE.
b. I only go there {SOMETIMES/*EVER}.
c. Only ONCE have I ever been there.
d. *Only EVER {do I go there/have I been there}.

Larry

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