INGs

[Wilson Gray]

I've heard this phrase all of my life. If ever I had occasion to write
it, I would use "to-ing and fro-ing."

Is there a similar problem with backing and filling, ripping and
running, slipping and sliding, peeping and hiding, and other such?

-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



On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      INGs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I have a tendency to be anal when it comes to certain kinds of analysis.
> When it comes to searches, I try to be exhaustive. So, when I came
> across an unfamiliar form of a familiar expression, I chose to dive in.
> The expression was simply too jarring for a [non-native] American ear
> and I was curious.
>
> In a Telegraph daily English soccer gossip bulletin (emailed), you can
> find [no link],
> -The Mirror, too, is full of possible *too-ings and fro-ings*.
> Manchester City have supposedly tried to bring Inter Milan striker
> Adriano to Eastlands in a swap deal with his compatriot Jo.
>
> I thought, at first, this was a one-off, but quickly discovered
> otherwise. This is what started the goose chase.
>
> Although Google shows 95000 raw hits for "too-ing", most are unrelated
> (and easily explicable). Still, there are quite a few. More precise
> "too-ing-and-fro-ing" gets 2660 raw hits (also 3790 raw for
> "tooing-and-froing", with nontrivial overlap). Of those where
> identification is possible, nearly all are of Australian or British
> origin, which explains my unfamiliarity with the expression (I was
> familiar with the base "to and fro"). I may have come across the
> specific expression before, but hadn't notice it.
>
> The phrase came up as a question on Yahoo Answers, but in a slightly
> different form (see more below):
>
> <http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080414015406AASPLky>
> -What about Tooing and frowing? Do you know?
> [Answer] -I'm always tooing and frowing between moods as I'm very fickle.
>
> Also, in WordReferenceForum:
>
> <http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=875013>
> -Hello,
> Could you help me to translate this sentence into french :
> "But the French Prime Minister Francois Fillon put it down to the usual
> tooing-and-froing of politics"
>
> It popped up in an [English] blog, along with a few other standards:
>
> <http://sally-onespace.blogspot.com/2008/07/too-ing-fro-ing-with-soulja-boy.html>
> _Too-ing & Fro-ing with Soulja Boy_
> Whew what a week!! this is no holiday i have been busier this past week
> than i think i have ever been. I have been *too-ing and fro-ing* all
> week, *ones doing this anothers do something else* and the others are
> doing something else again, whilst i have been trying to sort out the
> house and their messy bedroom.
> ...The kids all screamed like mad *you would of thought* they were at a
> concert when they got in.
>
> [would-of(f) and could-of(f) are old favorites of mine, but not relevant
> to this post]
>
> [slight detour follows] Interestingly, "tooing-and-frowing" earned
> another 799 hits, including this one, where "Frowing" earns a separate
> entry:
>
> <http://www.painintheenglish.com/post.php?id=1626>
> _Frowing_
> What does "tooing and frowing" mean? And why these words cannot be found
> in any dictionary (at least in those I looked at?) Is it a corruption of
> "to and fro?"
> Is "frowing" a word and could it be used separately and if so would it
> mean differently than that of the phrase?
>
> Three of the four comments treat it as a "misspelling". The last one
> jokes that it's a "poetic license".
>
> I thought, I'd search for "frowing" and it gives a surprising 17700
> hits, with only a handful representing proper nouns (of those, mostly
> surnames). There is a fair number of "frowing up", which I did not
> investigate too closely. Some look weird to me.
>
> <http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2005/12/frowing-on-stringancies.html>
> _Frowing on Stringancies_
> The Torah forbids us to marry sisters. The Torah says Jacob married
> sisters. The Torah says that Jacob followed the laws of the Torah. How
> can this be resolved?
>
> In some cases, it's just typo from "growing" (g->f on QWERTY) or
> "frowning" (w->0). For example "Songs for Frowing kids" has already been
> corrected. These are also fairly easily interpretable in context.
> <http://www.gfi.org.au/resources/songs_growing_kids.html>
> <http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080213160501AADBgyY>
> <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Product-Innovation-Endogenously-Frowing-Frictions/dp/B0018TAQRE>
>
> But the th->f conversion appears to be deliberate, although I am not
> sure if this is always a mistake or an occasional attempt at humor. Is
> this yet another effect of txting?
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzA8K2s0juw>
> <http://www.justanswer.com/questions/1e0wd-cat-keeps-sick-frowing-orange>
>
> Another bizarre one:
> <http://spellic.com/eng/dictionary/frowing>
>
> English: frowing
> Swedish: rynka på pannan
>
> Oddly enough, another site also claimed to have given a Swedish
> translation, but it turned out to be blank. There are also a claimed
> Japanese and Chinese translations, although I have no capacity to judge
> the accuracy.
> <http://www.proz.com/kudoz/english_to_japanese/medical/599025-grinding_tilted_stepped_or_irregular_and_frowing.html>
> <http://cdict.net/q/frowing >
>
> "Froing" also gave me the first clearly US hit, although the author
> turned out to be ... British!
>
> <http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g60974-i588-k2366814-To_ing_and_Fro_wing_Buffalo_Niagra_Falls-Buffalo_New_York.html>
> _To-ing and Fro-wing Buffalo - Niagra Falls_
> I am heading to Buffalo from Hamilton on a pretty tight schedule to
> attend a concert at Ashbury Hall on 29th Nov.
>
> [back to the original topic] This also reminded me to check
> "to-ing-and-fro-ing", which resulted in 94400 hits--much more than my
> original search.
>
> MWOL got a hit (backtracking to 1847, even including the plural, "toings
> and froings"), as did thefreeictionary.com.
> <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/to-ing+and+fro-ing>
> <http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/toing+and+froing>
>
> Another dictionary listed it as "uncountable" and gave a German
> translation: "Hin und Her", also clearly marking it as a Britishism.
> <http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/to-ing and fro-ing>
> <http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-german/to-ing and fro-ing>
>
> Although better represented, this version also appears to be mostly
> Australian and UK.
>
> There are three general connotations that I could devise:
>
> 1. commuting (or equivalent--going back-and-forth in a more general sense)
> 2. thrashing about (e.g., mulling over an idea)
> 3. hesitating (unsure of decision)
>
> Yet another version was "to-and-froing" with a variety of actual
> spellings. I tried "to-and-fro-ing" for 1640 raw hits. The variations
> included "to and fro-ing", "to-and-fro'ing", "to and fro'ing", "to-and
> fro-ing", "to-and-fro-ing" and "to and fro ing".
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artvin_Province>
> -This lasted 250 years until the area was ceded to the Russians by the
> Ottoman Empire following the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), and
> recovered and again ceded at the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War of
> 1877-78. This *to and fro-ing* from Russia to Turkey continued with the
> Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, Moscow, and Kars.
>
> <http://www.techmeme.com/080102/p27>
> -Amid all the *to-and-fro'ing* on Techmeme about Twitter and its lack of
> a business model comes a post from Jason "Mahalo" Calacanis, in which he
> tells us the secret to building a business model in Silicon Valley.
>
> <http://www.memecode.com/site/ver.php?id=166>
> -This involved a lot of work and *to and fro'ing* between Win32 and BeOS
> to check I didn't inadvertantly break anything but I'm happy now it's done.
>
> <http://books.google.com/books?id=MNUNAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=to-and-fro-ing&source=web&ots=m8WIOv9cmr&sig=Sv82dHX64Oklkrg2dGh6ZGAikfk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result>
> -As a result, today we need a new fillip of conviction and a lot of
> *to-and fro-ing* before we can persuade the speakers of these African
> languages of the dignity and scientific value of their own languages,
> let alone carrying out research, creative activities, government, etc.;
> in short, experiencing every linguistic phenomenon in, through and with
> African languages.
>
> <http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8779551>
> -By *to and fro ing* between the preview pdf and screen text I can now
> just about get everything right, but the screen text then looks off.
> Crude, but I can't see any other solution.
>
> Each of these occurred in multiple instances, so they were not
> accidental. There was also some evidence of divergence between "to-and
> fro-ing" and "to- and fro-ing", with the latter making more sense, but
> occurring less frequently. Finally, "to-and-frowing" got another 5290
> raw hits, both with and without hyphenation, including yet another offer
> of a German translation..
>
> <http://books.google.com/books?id=2rPqFvn3nocC&pg=PA310&lpg=PA310&dq=to-and-froing&source=web&ots=reanGF6FsJ&sig=w34Dgzmgj6ISCYUGkqnLR-8ptZc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result>
> -If we pass our present cosmic examination to continue aboard planet
> Earth in Universe, the *to-and-froing* of humanity will increase
> rapidly. The motion patterns of humanity, as also mentioned earlier, are
> pulsating between ever more widely convergent and divergent
> *to-and-froing*. [From R. Buckmister Fuller's Critical Path]
>
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ourpalnietzsche/message/18520>
> -There is a certain cultural to and froing.
>
> <http://www.dict.cc/english-german/to+and+froing.html>
> -to and froing
> Hin- und Herrennen {n}
>
> I make no futher claims about the semantics of any of these expressions.
>
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