"or so"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:56 PM -0700 9/8/08, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>In my Standard Idiolect of English, the phrase "or so" means
>"approximately but at least." So you could have knocked me down with
>a dodo feather when I read the following:
>
>2008 Roberta Frank, "Afterword," in Burton Raffel, trans. _Beowulf_
>(N.Y.: Signet) 141:
>The vivid rendering of _Beowulf_ by Burton Raffel [published in
>1963] has held up well over the past half century or so."
>
>I got news for you, Roberta Frank, Marie Borroff Professor of
>English at Yale University! 1963 is not fifty years ago "or so."
>It's forty-five years ago and, by God, it's going to stay that way!
>
>Does anybody here feel any different?
>
>JL
>
Picky, picky, says her fellow bull-ling-dog; that's the whole point
of the "or so".   (Roberta is a courtesy member of the Department of
Linguistics; indeed, we are probably the only department in the
country that now includes both a Roberta Frank and a Robert Frank (no
relation).)

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org