possible antedate of indiscriminative "whatever"?
Fred Shapiro
fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Sat Jul 22 12:41:45 UTC 2006
On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> It looks pretty solid to me. I'm trying to find a reason to
> dismiss it, but can't.
Aren't there two uses of intensive "whatever"? One is a recent voguish
use indicating extreme indifference: "if that's what you think, fine, it's
not important enough to me to argue about it, end of discussion, let's
move on to something else." The other is a more traditional usage,
unrecorded by OED, indicating anger and pronounced with a strong emphasis
on the second syllable: "the point you are making is irrelevant to the
real issue, which I will now explain to you." This traditional use is
probably elliptical for some saying like "whatever you say is besides the
point." I think Larry's example illustrates the second sense. Am I
misanalyzing this?
Fred
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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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