one-time "whenever", live

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Sep 2 04:05:11 UTC 2007


At 11:46 PM -0400 9/1/07, Alice Faber wrote:
>Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>>Just listening to Red Sox 22-year-old rookie "phenom" [that's
>>>>PHEE-nom] Clay Buchholz in his post-game interview after throwing a
>>>>no-hitter in his second appearance in the major leagues.  He was
>>>>asked about a great play behind him by second baseman Dustin Pedroia
>>>>who took away what looked like a sure hit in the seventh inning and
>>>>he responded along the lines of
>>>>
>>>>"Yeah, whenever he made that play I knew I had a shot [at the
>>>>no-hitter]."
>>>>
>>>>Not surprisingly, he sounds Southern (to me), and sure enough his bio
>>>>lists him as born in Nedarland, TX and as having attended Angelina
>>>>JC, also in Texas.
>>>>
>>>>I've read about (and even written about) episodic "whatever", but
>>>>I've never actually heard one live as far as I can remember.  Pretty
>>>>neat!
>>>
>>>He had several of them, along with a few more normative "whatever"s.
>>>
>>Alice, do you remember the syntactic context better than I do?  I was
>>so overwhelmed between the no-no and the episodic "whatever" that I
>>didn't really catch them, except for (sort of) the one about the play
>>when Tejada was robbed.  And I don't think any transcripts are
>>provided of post-game interviews (and even if they were, they'd
>>probably be "corrected").
>>
>
>The normative one was something like "whenever it's hit at Coco [Crisp],
>he gets it".
>
>The video of most of Buchholz' post-game remarks is up at www.nesn.com.
>I caught three "whenevers" in the 4 minute sequence. Two are clearly
>episodic, and one is ambiguous.

OK, thanks very much for the pointer.  For the record, here's my
transcription of the segment in which the two episodic "whenever"s
occur, both in relation to the same play (Buchholz tried to stab
Miguel Tejada's shot up the middle and couldn't, but Pedroia caught
it making full extension, turned, and nabbed Tejada at first).  It
starts at around 0:52 of the clip at the site Alice mentions.
=====================

Yeah I mean when...whenever I jumped up and missed that ball, I was
thinking to myself "It's over" and then he comes out of nowhere and
that's one of the best plays I've ever seen in ten years, anywhere,
and whenever he made that play I knew something, something was meant
to happen tonight.
======================

The "correction" of "when" to "whenever" at the start is particularly
striking to me.

LH

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