status quo = 'situation'

[Jonathan Lighter]

You may be right, Victor. But surely my sense that there's something very
odd about the usage isn't entirely idiosyncratic?

Ideally a dictionary definition should be completely substitutable for the
word defined.  "The possibility of an entrenched existing situation"?  I
don't think so. "Status" would  work - but would be just as peculiar.

To me, "What's the status quo?" is almost ungrammatical. "What was the
status quo?" is fine.

The "status quo" seems usually to be something you either want to get back
to or get away from, not something that merely exists. In my Western Front
example, "status quo" makes sense not because it means the "existing
situation," period; it implies that the situation is the same as it was
*before,* in this case for the past three years.  "An entrenched status
quo," at least in the context of the quotation, refers to a future
possibility rather than anything in the past (from the perspective of now,
of course).

Whether or not I've identified the specific problem correctly, I still
believe that the exampled usage is semantically odd, and that the OED
definition is overly broad. (Cf., perhaps, the subtleties of "anymore.")

JL

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:35 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: status quo = 'situation'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I don't see "situation" either. Perhaps they meant "status" rather
> than "status quo", or "balance of power", which is, more or less,
> stalemate. Either way, the reference is to some aspect of the
> _present_condition_. So it's not just "situation", but "the current
> situation", which is not as far off the traditional interpretation as
> Jon initially posted.
>
> VS-)
>
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I respectfully disagree.
> >
> > If the analyst had written, "We are facing the possibility of the status
> quo
> > becoming entrenched...", I doubt we would be having this conversation.
> >
> > I read "We may be facing the possibility of an entrenched status quo..."
> as
> > meaning the same thing.
> >
> > DanG
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Jonathan Lighter <
> wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> >>
>  >> I think the issue is what "means" means.
> >>
> >> The speaker chose to say "status quo" when the obvious choice for most
> of
> >> u=
> >> s
> >> (i.e., me) should have been "situation" or "long-term situation," etc.
> >>
> >> On the basis of the evidence, that's what he "meant."
> >>
> >> While it may be true that the kind of sitch he's talking about could
> also
> >> b=
> >> e
> >> described as a "stalemate," "status quo" would not *mean* "stalemate" in
> a
> >> dictionary sense except in
> >> statements such as:
> >>
> >> 1. *Nobody's winning! It's a status quo!
> >>
> >> Now there certainly are statements such as the following, in which
> "status
> >> quo" *refers* to a stalemate:
> >>
> >> 2. "What's been happening on the Western Front the past four years?"
> >> "Nothing much. Status quo."
> >>
> >> In 2, "status quo" means 'an existing situation that hasn't changed,'
> >> which=
> >> ,
> >> in this context, implies an actual stalemate.Status quo," under certain
> >> circumstances, can allude to a stalemate, but I don't believe it ever
> >> *means* "stalemate," because I don't believe that *anyone* who would say
> 2
> >> would also say 1.
> >>
> >> Unless they were very weird. So "status quo" doesn't "mean" stalemate.
> >>
> >> JL
>
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