Who's Ever Next
Today, while shopping at the too-hip-for-me Jasmine Sola in Harvard Square (my sister would be proud), the cashier asked me, "can I help who's ever next?" I noticed that she repeated the same thing to the person after me. Google turned up only 17 hits, one of which was another linguist's observation. (Of the two hits for "whose ever next," one was the aforecited page.) I think I might be able to say "I made a sandwich for who was next," unlike Matt Pearson, though... but as the Queen of Immediate Syntactic Satiation, my judgments are never to be trusted.
5 Comments:
I heard who's ever uttered by a (Boston-area) evening news reporter recently, but I can't recall the exact sentence. I do remember being puzzled. Is it an archaism, like who(m)/what so ever, or, if who/whatever have univerbated, a ... "re-tmesis" resembling the archaism?
I've definitely said "who's ever next" before, though it always struck me as faintly ungrammatical after I said it. I have no idea about the internal structure of whoever, so I can't really hypothesize about possible derivations, but it certainly feels like "whoever's next", just in a different order.
I (and my parents) grew up in Northern California, so it's probably not just a Boston thing.
It's definitely not an archaism; eliah's "whoever's next... in a different order" is more to the point. A close analog is the common "a whole nother..." When words are closely associated, morphemes can drift from one to the other. I'd certainly love to see a good explanation of how it works.
--language hat
I love a whole nother. I wonder if it's OK to use in formal writing yet.
This must be connected to something that I've been hearing servicepeople say for so long that I'd almost forgotten that it sounded wildly ungrammatical the first time I heard it (shortly after moving to Arizona).
They say, "Can I help who's next?"
They say it ALL the TIME. Thing is, this still is ungrammatical to me if I think about it for a second. It means, 'Can I help whoever's next?" I can't shorten 'whoever' to 'who'...It would be like changing 1 (below) to 2:
1. I'll give a dollar to whoever enters the room next.
2. *I'll give a dollar to who enters the room next.
anyone else got a star on 2 there?
Anyway, seems to me there's a collocation gaining steam in just that 'who's next' environment that 's now taking off via some kind of reanalysis... Or somethin'.
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