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

[Mark Mandel]

I always understood that usage as just an aspect of Southern dialect
representation. IIRC, there was quite a bit of that in the strip and I
think more with some characters (Porky the porcupine?) than with others
(Pogo?), whose English was more generally standard.

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 4:43 PM Andy Bach <afbach at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>

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