"sometime" (was: New to me)

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 3, 2012, at 8:50 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> On Mar 2, 2012, at 6:37 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>
>> From the ZDNet site:
>>
>>  "Show _Anyways_?"
>>
>> I've heard this in the wild since forever and I've seen it in print as
>> an oddity used to provide color, like _youse_ or _y'all_, but I've
>> never seen it in an "official," as it were, document, so to speak.
>>
>> You click on "Show Anyways?" and deleted posts from _Below threshold_
>> are displayed.
>>
>
> entries in both DARE and MWDEU.  here's Gabe Doyle on the form:
>
> http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/s-series-i-anyways/
>
> The historical source of anyways is as the adverbial genitive of any way, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In this regard, anyways is analogous to always (genitive of all way(s)) or sometimes (genitive or plural of some time). The difference is that for the latter two words, the genitive version solidly beat out the bare form. Alway is basically gone from English now, and sometime lingers on as an adjective in only a limited, often literary, role (e.g., there is a blog titled Life and Times of a Sometime Poet).** […]
>

Odd that this entry doesn't acknowledge what at least for me is a salient semantic contrast, i.e. a division of labor between "sometimes" (the frequentative adverb) and "sometime" (a fancy version of 'former', not of 'sometimes').  In the above, I assume the blogger used to be a poet, not that s/he is a poet on occasion.

But on consulting the AHD usage note, I see that I'm being too hasty here:  there are actually two distinct words, one with the 'former' meaning which has been around since the 15th century and the other as indicated above, attested since the 1930s (ex.: "the team's sometime star and sometime problem child").  Go know.  Although if it's only attested since the 1930s, is it really a case of the earlier historical non-genitive form of the frequentative _sometimes_ "linger[ing] on"?  I'd guess the "sometime poet" (Bob, evidently) and "sometime problem child" involve a 20th century back-formation of an adjective to correspond to the adverb _sometimes_, not a relic of (some)time past.

LH

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