given = 'if; assuming'

[Jonathan Lighter]

> she strikes me as sufficiently regal (when she needs to be).

Don't watch _Anonymous_ (2011).

But don't watch it anyway.

JL

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: given = 'if; assuming'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On May 6, 2012, at 3:02 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > No OED.
> >
> > 2006 Amazon.com review of _Camelot_ :    I find it hard to imagine
> [Vanessa
> > Redgrave] as a queen at all for she lacks the regal bearing and elegance
> > needed to play this queen of legend. Her singing is acceptable given you
> > have never heard Julie [Andrews] in this score. Julie brought the right
> > amount of natural elegance to the role while still being mischievous,
> > flirtatious and sly when needed....
> >
> > Obviously a literate writer.
> >
> Is this a problem with the writer or with the OED?  Granted, I'd have used
> a "that" with "given" here, but I don't see anything in either the entry
> for "given, adj." or "give, v." that would register this use of "given
> that" as a "compound conjunction" akin to "provided (that)", which does
> have such an entry with ample cites back to the 15th century (for versions
> with and without "that").  It's easy to find parallel uses of "given that",
> but I'm not sure how to search "given" tout court as a conjunction (and as
> noted, it doesn't really work without "that" for me).
>
> I also think the author is only half-right about Vanessa Redgrave--given
> *(that) she's no Julie Andrews voice-wise, she strikes me as sufficiently
> regal (when she needs to be).
>
> LH
>
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