INGs

Tue Jan 13 19:36:39 UTC 2009

At 2:12 PM -0500 1/13/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>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."
>

Yes, the problem with "possible toings and
froings" is that both gerunds would be reanalyzed
as monosyllabic nouns.  Elegant monosyllables to
be sure (rhyming with Gerald McBoing-Boing), but
a bit garden-pathy in this context.  Curiously (I
expect because of its frequency), we have no
problem with the hyphenlessness of "going".

LH

>On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>>  Poster:       Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject:      INGs
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>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  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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>>
>
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