"have ever been"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Sep 13 17:48:56 UTC 2006


At 8:33 AM -0700 9/13/06, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Sep 13, 2006, at 7:56 AM, i wrote:
>
>>... the 'always' sense of "ever" does survive in "forever"...
>
>roger shuy writes to provide some other survivals:
>
>"everloving" (130,000 hits)
>"everblooming" (63,500 hits).
>  (Even Pogo's expression, "everloving blue-eyed world" gets 571.)
>"Ever yours" as a kind of "yours truly" gets 120 million.
>

There's also the preadjectival "ever" of "ever-popular" and
"evergreen" (can't recall if these were mentioned on this thread), as
well as the "ever" before nominals ("ever the optimist/diplomat"),
and a variety of archaic uses, e.g. "'Twas ever thus", or the odd
occurrence in this passage from Updike:

There is a slight slenderness to the later [Neanderthal] fossils that
some paleoanthropologists take as evidence of interbreeding with Homo
sapiens.  Fat chance, say other paleoanthropologists; it was ever
nothing but war, mutual abhorrence, and murder between the races.
  (John Updike (1997), Toward the End of Time, pp. 27-28)


Then there are the "ever"s that occur with comparatives ("ever
closer", "ever louder", "ever more confusing") that aren't akin to
either 'always' or 'at any time' but are closer to 'increasingly'.
This would have a separate OED entry, of course, as would the
nontemporal intensifier of the "ever so [e.g. humble, grateful]"
construction.

larry

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