Heard on The Judges: "_for_ to"

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Benjamin
Zimmer<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Judges: "_for_ to"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>> >
>> > On Aug 4, 2009, at 7:35 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> >
>> >> Late-teen-aged, black male college student from Ohio, using
>> >> Northern-BE phonology, i.e. r-ful, "right" [raIt]:
>> >>
>> >> "I went to college _for_ to do the right thing."
>> >>
>> >> I know that the continued use of "for to" is hardly startling, but the
>> >> fact that it was used by such a young, Northern person I thought might
>> >> be of peripheral interest.
>> >
>> > i'm away from my copy of DARE, and failed to locate an entry for "for
>> > to" by searching DARE on-line... so can anyone report on what's known
>> > about the social and regional distribution of "for to" in current
>> > English?  (the OED is, of course, not of much use here, since it gives
>> > older examples and merely reports that the usage is obsolete "in
>> > educated use".)
>>
>> Damn! I hate when this happens! I usually try to keep in mind that the
>> fact that black people may use a given syntactic structure all of the
>> time still leaves the occurrence of said structure a rarity. The
>> "fuck-over" syndrome strikes again!
>
> Well, even those who lack the construction in their dialect have
> probably heard it deployed lyrically in "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"
> ("Coming for to carry me home"), "Oh, Susanna" ("I'm going to
> Louisiana, my true love for to see"), "Mr. Tambourine Man" ("I'm ready
> to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade"), "A Horse With No Name"
> ("There ain't no one for to give you no pain"), etc.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
Thanks, Ben! The exact wording of that line from "Mr. Tambourine Man"
has evaded me for years! Of course, I could always have googled the
lyrics, but that been one of many, many things that I've never gotten
around to doing.
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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