stunning antedating

[Wilson Gray]

This sounds good to me, too, arnold. Is that what you mean by "a minority
taste"? <har! har!>

-Wilson

On 3/18/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      stunning antedating
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> joel wallenberg writes from the university of pennsylvania with a
> stunning antedating of the GoToGo construction that some -- a
> minority of -- english speakers have.  i'm away from these (hard-
> copy) files, but the earliest examples david denison had found was
> around 1920.  and now:
>
> ------
> from a column Mark Twain wrote for the paper the San Francisco
> Morning Call, August 7, 1864:
>
> "This was a touching allusion to his repeated assertions, made at
> divers and sundry times during the past few years, that he was going
> off immediately and commit suicide."
> ------
>
> [the "going" here is, effectively, a telescoping of "going to go",
> and conveys both the prospective sense of "go" and the motion sense.]
>
> that's getting it back about fifty years.
>
> arnold, who has this construction in his variety but understands it's
> a minority taste
>
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