{"id":202,"date":"2004-05-22T15:38:25","date_gmt":"2004-05-22T19:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/05\/22\/the-lord-provides\/"},"modified":"2004-05-22T15:38:25","modified_gmt":"2004-05-22T19:38:25","slug":"the-lord-provides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/05\/22\/the-lord-provides\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lord Provides"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Words come when you need them. One day you meet a curious new one, or reencounter a strange old friend. Your curiosity having been engaged but for whatever reason left unsatisfied, what do you see next day but the same word! I have seen so many instances of this phenomenon that I am hard put to attribute it to any influence but that of a kind and loving God.<\/p>\n

For instance, summat<\/i>, meaning “something” in certain dialects of English. I convinced myself last night that characters in The Office<\/a> were using this word, which I’d only seen in books.<\/p>\n

It’s an easy-to-say version of somewhat<\/i>. Folks I talk to only use somewhat<\/i> adverbially, as in “Isn’t it somewhat annoyingly faux-folksy to use the word folks<\/i> in linguistic exposition?”. But since its earliest days it’s also been able to mean “something”, which is easy to handle if you think of what<\/i> not as relative or interrogative, but as substantival. If you see what what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n

Anyways, I was catching up today on the disheartening backlog of words I’ve marked to look up in Patrick O’Brian novels, and came across the following [H.M.S. Surprise<\/i>, p. 68]:<\/p>\n

\nHe found himself staring at Killick, who said, ‘Three bells, sir. Gentleman back presently. Here’s coffee, sir, and a rasher. Do get summat in your gaff, sir, God love us.’\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I’ve seen the word in George Eliot, too, so maybe it’s “Midlands” English? That label, however, wouldn’t quite fit Slough<\/a>, where The Office<\/i> is set — that city is in the Southeast of England. Ah well — I just don’t have the right dictionary to know about the distribution of summat<\/i>. The OED is very close to useless on regional variation — alls you ever get is their haughty little “regional” label, with never an indication of what “region” they’re talking about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Words come when you need them. One day you meet a curious new one, or reencounter a strange old friend. Your curiosity having been engaged but for whatever reason left unsatisfied, what do you see next day but the same word! I have seen so many instances of this phenomenon that I am hard put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}