innovative "nevertheless"

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

    I'd speculate that there may be a two stage origin to this speech error: First: blending of "much less" + "never mind" to *never less. (The asterisk indicates that the form isn't actually spoken but is reconstructed).  Then this *"never less" was adapted to the already existing (and very similar) "nevertheless."
  
   To illustrate this development, cf. the sentence given by Chris Waigl below, which might have arisen as follows:
1) "First, we have no control over the streets of Baghdad, much less the
whole country,..."
 +
2) First, we have no control over the streets of Baghdad never mind the
whole country,..."
 
----resulting in the blend:
 
3) First, we have no control over the streets of Baghdad never [the] less the
whole country, so how can we enforce this solution on anybody? ----[G. Cohen: I'm reconstructing this stage, which does not contain "the" between "never" and "less."]
 
Then by adaption of *never less to the already existing "nevertheless" we get:
 
4) "First, we have no control over the streets of Baghdad never the less the
whole country, so how can we enforce this solution on anybody?"
 
    This speculation may or may not be correct.  But on a general note, we should be aware that oddities in language may arise not merely from a single process (e. g. blending) but from the successive occurence of two or more processes.  
 
Gerald Cohen

________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Chris F Waigl
Sent: Fri 11/24/2006 1:36 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: innovative "nevertheless"



Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>> a sighting of "nevertheless" used like "not to mention" or "to say
>>> nothing of", with a request for other cites, and a brief discussion
>>> of how one might search for such things (with a reference to the
>>> stanford ALL project):
>>>
>>> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003815.html
>>>
>> In this instance my impression is that "nevertheless" is simply an
>> error
>> for the 'conjunction' "much less" ...
>>
>
> good idea (which i've added to the posting).  though it was surely an
> error at first, the question is whether it's spreading.
>

Here's another one:

====
First, we have no control over the streets of Baghdad never the less the
whole country, so how can we enforce this solution on anybody?
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_sameh_ab_061025_iraq_2c_the_single_way.htm
====

Chris Waigl

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