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woe is » woeth

Chiefly in:   woeth me

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “The 40-minute documentary is not a woeth-me, self-righteous trip of blame and disgust at men, but a well-crafted and humorous tale of action and reaction to the Yale women’s stance on equality and those affected beyond 1976.” (link)
  • “I dont know. Im not sure about anything these days. Oh woeth me.” (link)
  • “I feel as though you have bared my soul to the world. I am currently attempting to slit my wrists, but alas the effect I desired cannot be obtained with a ruler. OH WOETH ME!!!!” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Tommy Grano (e-mail of 4 August 2005)

Grano first came across the wonderful “woeth me” in a transcription of speech in a large corpus he was working with. Then he found some web occurrences and suggested that “because people recognize “woe is me” as sounding archaic, it would make sense for them that “woe” could be a verb, and take an archaic verb inflection.”

[CW, 2005-08-23: See also _Whoa is me!_]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/05 |

by and by » bye and bye

Classification: English – nearly mainstream – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Children it’s bye, bye, better bye and bye / We will understand it better bye and bye.” (link)
  • “You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” (link)
  • “I said bye and bye I’m going to see the King Bye and bye I am going to see the King … Bye and bye I will hear the angel sing And I don’t mind dying, …” (link)
  • “The Chippendales would get their money bye and bye, he replied. “Bye and bye!” she shrieked like a jackdaw. “We’ll need a joint of beef a damn sight sooner…” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Jim Heckman (sci.lang posting of 4 August 2005)

“Bye” occurs occasionally as a variant spelling of “by”, including in the idiom “by and by” ‘in a while’ (for which the OED has cites from 1330, in the modern sense from 1526; the OED has no separate entry for “bye and bye”). But, especially in hymns and folk songs, the expression “bye-bye” (from “good-bye”, from “god be with you”, with no involvement of “by” at all) seems to have been imported into the spelling of “by and by”, no doubt because it contributes its sense of saying farewell (to this bad world). This is pretty clearly the case in my first cite.

The spelling “bye and bye” is frequent: 45,700 raw Google webhits, as against 642,000 for “by and by”. These counts are inflated by many repeated appearances of lines from songs — but both counts are inflated, and by many of the same songs.

In a further interesting twist, people occasionally declare that “by(e) and by(e)” means ‘in the past’. This might be a consequence of the janus-faced nature of “bye-bye”, which looks both into the past and towards the future.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/05 |

hue and cry » human cry

Classification: English – and «» in/en – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • There was literally a human cry from around the state during the hearings held on this Issue in House H&SS Committee. (Mental Health Assoc. in Alaska, Bridges Final Report, 2000)
  • This raised a human (?) cry in Boston and throughout the United States. (Kennedy Library, Race in the Military forum transcript, Nov. 12, 2001)
  • The January 23 CyberAlert distributed earlier today quoted CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as declaring: “There’s been an international human cry and it continues over the condition of Afghan war detainees being held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.” CyberAlert reader Tom Johnson suggested to me that Blitzer probably said “hue and cry,” not “human cry.” (Media Research Center, CyberAlert Extra, Jan. 23, 2002)
  • “Please join me in raising a human cry,” said Val J. Peter, executive director of Girls and Boys Town. (Associated Press, Nov. 15, 2002)

Analyzed or reported by:

| 3 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/04 |

bandy » banty

Chiefly in:   bantied about

Classification: English – questionable

Heard on CNN by one of the young women announcers. Heard today (Aug 3, 2005), but have heard it in the past. She probably intends to say “bandied about”, and is mixing the word “bandy” with “banter”.

[Marked “questionable” while waiting for other instances beyond a possible one-time production error. CW.]

| 1 comment | link | entered by durk183, 2005/08/04 |

impact(ed) » inpacked

Variant(s):  impacked

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I heard you guys when you spoke at Metro Community Church in Edwardsville Illinois and I can not tell you guys how much you inpacked my life. (Turnbull Ministries guestbook, Mar. 4, 2004)
  • you can see the bullet inpacked on them and see the hide jump from the shock. (Water and Woods forum, May 20, 2004)
  • Other than grinding and clenching your teeth (stress/bracing) at night, my suggestion would be that your sinuses are impacked, etc. (Ask Dr. Stoll bulletin board, Sep. 26, 2003)
  • Does an Oral Surgeon normally have the help of an assistant during a scheduled appointment to extract 4 impacked wisdom teeth? (New Jersey Dental Association, Ask a Dentist, Mar. 19, 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/02 |
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