Re: To waffle, ‘to waver, to vacillate, to equivocate, to dither’

Antonio Marques wrote:

jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

Antonio Marques wrote:
 

Bertel Lund Hansen <gadekryds@lundhansen.dk> wrote:

jerryfriedman wrote:
 

By the way, Steve isn't the only participant in a.u.e. who doesn't
notice Subject lines.

 Certainly not.
 

I don't know how that happens,

 Automatically. And I hate it if I am 'forced' to quote something that
appears only in the subject line.
 

 

Never mind that in the bit that Steve quoted to flippantly inquire on what
'that' meant, it was quite explicitly said 'dither'.

 The "it" there isn't idiomatic

The sentence sounded wrong to me, but even now I'm not sure why.
As to 'it', maybe it's not idiomatic, but is it ungrammatical? I don't
quite see it.

"It" refers to "dither", so they're competing to be the subject of the
clause.  If the sentence is an example of what I believe you linguists
call "right dislocation", you'd want a comma before "dither", and this
would be a very strange spot for the construction, for reasons I can't
define except that it's typically colloquial.
Otherwise, we've got "pseudocleft sentences" such as "It doesn't matter
where it happened" (compare "Where it happened doesn't matter"), but
the noun phrase corresponding to the initial "It" has to be a clause
or a to+infinite phrase/clause.
(All subject to correction, notably of terminology.)

(though English has similar constructions that
do have an "it").  You could write "'dither' was quite explicitly said."
I might write something like "the meaning was explicitly 'dither'."

I could, but that would move the topic from the intended position. I can't
think of a suitable alternative.

There's "In the bit that Steve quoted to flippantly inquire what 'that'
meant, it quite explicitly said 'dither'."  That's somewhat informal, I'd
say.  What's the antecedent of "it"?  More formally, you could write
"the text said" or "Aidan said".
If the subject were shorter, you could write "The bit that Steve quoted
explicitly said 'dither'."  Or maybe you'd want something instead of
"said", such as "included the word".  But what you actually wrote was
too long for that to be comfortable.

Also, "on" would be better as "about", or better still deleted, in my
opinion.

That's another interesting thing. You're right that it sounds better
without a preposition. But... where did I acquire inquire on from?
The best I could come up with in a lazy search was that it exists but
doesn't seem appear in reputable sources. One page suggests inquire should
take the same or no prepositions as ask, which sounds neat but may be
wrong. Ask on doesn't certainly seem possible, unless in the unrelated keep
asking meaning.

This should provide some more material for comment.

..
In a minute of thought, I can't think of a situation where you could
replace "ask" with "inquire" but would change the preposition.
(I might have time later to return to the topic of contempt by default.)
--
Jerry Friedman