usually always

[James Harbeck]

I heard again today in passing one of my favourite usages: "usually
always," as in "I usually always park there." I love it because by
the "official" definitions it's oxymoronic, but people use it and
understand it, and thus it shows us that for these users (as, I
suspect, for most, at least in Canada and the US), "always" really
means not "without exception" but rather "as a rule."

The problem with tracking a usage like this, of course, is that it's
really not so common for written English. Notwithstanding this, it
does show up in newspapers. The New York Times has it in 29 instances
dating from 1871 to the present. (Alas, I can't inspect the exact
context of most of these, as I'm too cheap to be a Times Select
subscriber. Actually, the real reason I don't subscribe is the extra
half hour I'd lose every day reading the Op-Eds.) But there's a bit
of a gap between 1936 and 1961.

Earlier cites, anyone?

James Harbeck.

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