[Ads-l] come = minutes before (the hour of ...)

[Andy Bach]

In the the comic strip “Pogo”, I believe
Albert the alligator would describe any day with a 13 date as “Friday the
13th come on a Tuesday” or whatever day iT was. Friday the 13th come on a
Friday just made it worse.

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 1:40 PM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> > On Nov 23, 2019, at 9:19 PM, Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Heard on WRTI, a public radio station out of Temple University here in
> > Philadelphia:
> >
> > "twenty-one come nine" (8:39pm)
>
> cool  fact. this is an extension of the existing use of "come" as a time
> preposition (historically from an old subjunctive, apparently), as in this
> NOAD entry:
>
> ...
> prep. come: _informal_ when a specified time is reached or event happens:
> "I don't think that they'll be far away from honors come the new season."
> ...
>
> the semantics here is of time at which, but in Mark's ex. it's time before
> which -- a use of "come" in numerical time expressions, as an alternative
> to before /  till / to / (AmE) of.  there's a story to be told there.
>
> meanwhile, "come" in such expressions is remarkably hard to search for,
> though more examples *in context* would be highly desirable. anyone have
> some?
>
> NOTE: the template is a single TimeLocationExpression of the form
>     TimeMeasureExpression COME TimeLocationExpression
> it's obviously extendable to things like "a quarter before/come noon" and,
> presumably to things like "two days before/come Christmas in "it happened
> two days before/come Christmas".
>
> (something like "two weeks come/on Tuesday/Christmas" in "it will be two
> weeks come/on Tuesday/Christmas" -- easily attested, with exx. in the OED
> -- is beside the point; this is two time adverbials in sequence, not a
> single time adverbial with two constituents.)
>
> arnold
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
-- 
Andy Bach
Afbach at gmail.com
Not at my desk

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org