Oftenly

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

    "Fastly" based on its antonym "slowly" seems to be something that only children would produce (although it could  later be imitated by adults, if they so wished).  I can't imagine an adult producing "fastly" under the influence of "slowly."  But I *can* imagine it being produced by a blend, since blending frequently occurs in adult speech--as slips of the tongue, it is true, but then that is an integral part of the nature of blending.  Very few  blends make it to the big-time of the standard language (e.g., "time and again" from "time after time" and "again and again.").
 
     So "fastly," if produced spontaneously in adult speech, would like derive from a blending of "fast" + "quickly."
 
     Now, if "oftenly" arose in adult speech, I see no problem in invoking blending *at least as a possibility.*  I've been noticing (and often writing down) blends for almost 40 years.  Some may be more convincing than others, but the overall picture I have is of a linguistic feature which occurs more often than the linguistic community as a whole has recognized. 
 
    In another message today Arnold quotes an earlier message of his:
  >i think that jerry's use of "blend" here stretches the word beyond
all usefulness.  it's just wrong to use a single term for all
expressions that can be analyzed as a combination of two expressions.<
 
     Beyond all usefulness?  I respectfully disagree.  If blending really is very frequent in language; if there are lexical blends as well as syntactic ones (and this isn't original with me); and if people frequently say "often" and "frequently," I see nothing daring in saying that if a form "oftenly" arises, it may be a blend of the two words.  Now, maybe "oftenly" arose by analogy with the antonym "rarely" or "seldomly."   But to rule out blending because the term allegedly is "beyond all usefulness" is to run the  risk of setting aside a very useful tool in analyzing speech errors and the origin of various idiomatic features of English.
 
Gerald Cohen
 
    
________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn
Sent: Thu 8/23/2007 10:00 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Oftenly



At 3:34 PM -0500 8/22/07, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>For some other reason? Yes, try blending: "often" + "frequently."
>
>Gerald Cohen

My problem with the diagnosis of blending is that it's very difficult
to demonstrate (without some psycholinguistic evidence, perhaps).
Consider for example the frequent occurrence (mentioned in this
thread and previous ones) of "fastly":  a blend of "fast" and
"quickly"? "fast" and "rapidly"?  "fast" and its adverbial antonym
"slowly"?  Or just the reconstruction of (adverbial) "fast" with the
widely productive adverbial "-ly"?  How can we tell?  The latter
might traditionally be termed analogical formation, but there's no
*specific* target the way there is with blends.  If children, in
particularly, come out with "fastly", it seems implausible that
they're blending "fast" with the far less frequent and later-learned
"quickly"/"rapidly".   I suspect that "oftenly" and "seldomly" can be
motivated by an account of the morphology of adverbial "-ly" without
invoking specific "-ly"-bearing adverbs like "frequently" or
"occasionally" or "rarely", although the more these adverbs are
used/heard, the more likely the analogical formation will be.  I'm
happy to invoke blending in cases where there's evidence for a
particular source pair, but I'm not sure why we'd want or need to
generalize it to these cases.

LH

>
>________________________________
>
>From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Michael Quinion
>Sent: Wed 8/22/2007 3:39 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Oftenly
>
>
>
>A subscriber pointed out that a large number of examples of this form can
>be found online (and I've found examples in newspapers). The OED says "Now
>U.S. regional (rare)", which is clearly outdated. Would its reappearance
>be the result of hypercorrection, or for some other reason?
>
>--
>Michael Quinion
>Editor, World Wide Words
>E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
>Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>
>
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