possible antedate of indiscriminative "whatever"?
Joel S. Berson
Berson at ATT.NET
Sat Jul 22 13:24:03 UTC 2006
Oral memory is elusive--one should hear the scene (wait for the next
repeat on Turner Classic Movies!). But I don't remember a stress on
the second syllable, and do remember receiving the "recent voguish"
sense. I think I remember that the speaker sounds resigned, and the
discussion moves on to another aspect of the crime.
Joel
At 7/22/2006 08:41 AM, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>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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