Re: USAGE: Hither, thither and yon (was Re: Weekly Vocab 26)
| From: | Tristan McLeay <zsau@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, October 19, 2003, 22:09 |
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On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Roger Mills wrote:
> Paul Bennett/A.Walker/M.Reed have discussed--
> > What about the phrase "Hither, thither and yon", which I've
> > encountered in quasi-archiac contexts (i.e. from my Grandparents)
> > meaning "All over the place"? Is this something unique to both sets
> > of my grandparents (from different regional and social lects), or is
> > it just British, or is it archaic, or what is the exact distribution?
> >
> Yes, that's familiar to me too, in a grandparently context; the 3 who were
> US-born were pure upper midwest in speech.
Funny, I'd associated it with British. But then, Archaic and British are
almost synonyms to me, conceptually :) (It doesn't help that my
grandmother---the Australian one---uses archaisms and sounds relatively
British. Or maybe she sounds British because she uses them. At any rate,
she used 'us' in the singular a while ago, something I've never heard my
parents (or any of their generation) do, so she's either copied it off my
generation (unlikely) or it skipped a generation or something. Is singular
us used in Britain? (e.g. 'pass us the knife' was what she said)).
--
Tristan <kesuari@...>
From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.
-- Dr. Seuss
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