Whenever I hear a good example (who/whoever)

[Mark Davies]

Could this be related to who / whoever ? When I moved to Utah five years ago, I was struck by sentences like the following:

"I can help who's next"

(said, for example, by a worker at fast food restaurant, as a number of people are waiting in line).

I'd use "I can help whoever's next".

I know this use of "who" wasn't here in Utah back in the 1970s-1980s, but it seems to be the norm now.

Mark D.

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
> Charles Doyle
> Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 5:55 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Whenever I hear a good example
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Whenever I hear a good example
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I wonder if the preference of "whenever" to "when" somehow parallels the replacement,
> usually always in undergraduate writing nowadays, of "in" with "within"?
>
> --Charlie
> _____________________________________________________________
>
> ---- Original message ----
> >Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 22:19:53 -0400
> >From: James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> >
> >>"Sometimes whenever you slow down the car drives worse."
>
> > I usually never use that turn of phrase myself. Actually, I don't think I've heard it
> before, but I like it.
> >
> >("Usually always" is actually one of my favourites because of what it shows about
> how the users are conceptualizing "always" -- to mean "as a rule" rather "without
> exception." This seems to be a parallel sort of example.)
> >
> >James Harbeck.
>
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