Rules against most?

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 10, 2009, at 6:29 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> My WAG is that the student's natural use of
> only "most" for both words had been "corrected" so many times that he
> had unfortunately concluded that there was *no* correct use of "most."
> Hence, his surprise that a *teacher* would use it and his inability to
> explain why her use of it was wrong.

my guess too, though i suspect that the student doesn't object to
absolutely all occurrences of "most" (still, who knows? maybe the
student thinks "most of the people" should be "almost all of the
people").  but there's no way to find out, since the student has
access only to his judgments, not to the source of those judgments or
to generalizations about those judgments.

>
> It seems to me that "almost" is headed for the grave, since I've seen
> "most" used even in the NYT in environments in which once "almost" was
> the only choice of the literate.

surely not headed for the grave.  it's all over the place.  huge
numbers in the NYT -- on just the first page of hits from the past
week: almost no one at the shows, almost certainly will, in almost any
metropolitan area, almost over, up almost 6%, in almost every sector
of the economy, almost immediately comprehensible, went almost
babyish, for almost everybody, almost eight months, almost half the
patients.

but Wilson is right in saying that the NYT does use "most" for
"almost" surprisingly often, but only in certain circumstances; most
of  the occurrences of "almost" in the list  above could not be
replaced by "most", and in several cases the "almost" and "most"
versions are clearly different in meaning ("almost certainly will" vs.
"most certainly will", for instance -- the former with the
approximative "almost", the latter with the superlative "most").

however, there are huge numbers of occurrences of, for instance, "most
everyone".  from recent stories in the NYT: financially secure by most
everyone's count, but for most everyone else, for most everyone that
is not neo-liberal, most everyone has a story to tell, most everyone
who works in or watches ..., with most everyone on the premises,
something for most everyone in California to despise.

it's not just the NYT.  similar examples can be found in the LA Times,
the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other U.S.
publications. and it's not a recent development.  the OED (draft
revision of December 2008) has a subentry for this use of "most"
'almost, nearly':

   Chiefly N. Amer. Modifying certain universal and non-assertive
determiners and pronouns, as all, any, every, anyone, everything,
etc., and corresponding adverbs of time and place, as always,
anywhere, everywhere.
.....

the cites begin with George Washington in 1770 and extend to 1992,
with the Wall Street Journal in 1968 and Alison Lurie in 1988 in
between.  it's not at all clear to me that all these cites belong in
this subentry rather than in the subentry for colloquial "most"
'almost, nearly' (often spelled "'most"), which has cites from the
16th century on and the note "now regional (chiefly Sc., Irish English
(north.), U.S., Caribbean").  some of the cites are from reported
speech and have a colloquial feel to them.  but not all of them are
like that.  in any case, it seems that "most" is now available in
standard AmE as a modifier for universals.

it's also not clear to me that the gloss 'almost, nearly' is
appropriate for all of these examples.  some of them could be
superlative "most" denoting the greatest part of something; that is,
"most everyone" could just be the way 'most of everyone' is expressed
(rather than being a clipping of "almost everyone").  it's hard to
discriminate these accounts on the basis of meaning, since the
greatest part of everyone is, in fact, almost everyone.

arnold

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