"or either"?

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Apr 23 03:51:20 UTC 2008


arnold writes:

"[N]ot all ... examples [of this phenomenon] have 'or either'
replaceable by 'or else'."

FWIW, it's never before occurred to me that *any* example of "or
either" could be replaced by "or else." Heretofore, I've "corrected"
these forms only by deleting the second "either." But now, I see that,
in a number of examples, it's clearly the case that changing the
second "either" to "else" also "corrects" these forms. Kiss my ass!
Ain't that a bitch?!

-Wilson

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>  Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>  Subject:      Re: "or either"?
>  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  On Apr 21, 2008, at 8:48 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>  > I've been noticing "or either" = 'or else' for quite a while and my
>  > impression is that it's spreading.  DARE says it's "chiefly
>  > S[ou]th[ern]", and has cites back to 1898:
>  > "Everything had been moved out or moved in or either moved off." My
>  > impression, also just FWIW, is that it's also frequent in
>  > non-Southern AAVE.  [confirmed by Wilson Gray]
>
>  the hits i got for "either ... or either ..." were from all over the
>  place (even australia).  and now a hit for "if you * or either you":
>
>  If you need support on this item or either you don't have the PDF
>  reader software, you can check the following link: Adobe PDF Reader ...
>  www.iczoo.org/australia2006.htm
>
>  (this stuff is hard to search for.)  not all of my examples have "or
>  either" replaceable by "or else".
>
>  arnold
>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

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