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

Antonio Marques wrote:

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

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",

No, it's an impersonal passive, and I've just found out that for the

last

30/40 years I may have been using a construct that english doesn't have.

It's probably late to erase it from my grammar, never mind that I like

it.

Oh, well.

so they're competing to be the subject of the
clause.  If the sentence is an example of what I believe you linguists

(That's not me.)

Sorry.

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.

I won't say I've never used that one, but I agree it's much too marked.

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.

It wouldn't be the first time I've seen that construction where I

expected

'mine'.

Aha!

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.

Which brings us to there being no proper alternative, which is odd but
doesn't look likely to interfere with my sleep.

..
There are certainly alternatives that end with the word you want.  I
suggested "the meaning was explicitly 'dither'," and you could also write
"there was the explicit word 'dither'" or "he could have seen 'dither'" or
or or... There may be no single alternative you can always choose if you
want to resist the temptation of an impersonal passive with "it".
--
Jerry Friedman