"I'll see you on tomo rrow"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I believe I've actually heard "I can do it on tomorrow" from either a student or a receptionist, but if so it was within the past five years and no more than once or twice.

  No synapses suggest that I've ever seen it in print. In other words, if it's some sort of
dialectal holdover from the Middle Ages, it should appear in American writing somewhere, but I don't think I've ever seen it on a page.

  FWIW, I suspect it's a whippersnapper expression.

  JL
"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_=A0_=A0_=A0_Re:_[ADS-L]_"I'll_see_you_on_tomo?
= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?rrow"?=
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On Jul 8, 2006, at 8:43 AM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> One can of course say, "I'll see you on the morrow," though it
> sounds rather
> stilted and archaic. I've nevder checked the etymology of TOMORROW
> -- always
> assumed it was a contraction of "the morrow" (with the voiced
> fricative
> becoming a stop as it does so frequently in English dialects, and
> with the stop also
> becoming voiceless--a little harder to explain, I suppose).

actually (from the OED), the preposition "to" (in a sense 'at (a
time), on (a day)' that is now only dialectal) plus a noun cognate
with gm. Morgen 'morning', so parallel to an old word "to-morn", also
occurring in the form "morrow" (which also had the 'morning' sense
before the 'on the next day' sense).

arnold

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