In the toaster thread, someone posted this sentence, “What with the advent of miracle plastics, a lot more appliances are held together with nasty plastic tabby things than with screws anymore.”
Now, I’m not trying to single this poster out, but it was an example I came across of something I know I’ve seen reading the Dope from time to time. I don’t think I’d heard the construction before reading it here, and I wonder how common it is for people. If I were to say the above, I’d change the final “anymore” to “now.” The only time I’d use anymore at the end of a sentence like that is if the sentence is negative. F’r 'zample, “The movie theater isn’t there anymore,” or “I don’t get books in the mail like I used to anymore.”
Can anyone weigh in on both the grammatical aspects of using anymore like the poster did above and whether or not it’s a regional thing. And again, sorry to single this one example out, I just didn’t know how to search for other examples of something that I know I’ve seen around here at least enough to mentally mark it.
It bugs the shit out of me. I guess it’s a southern (?) US thing. I should accept it as a regionalism, but I can’t. If you use this construction, please accept my apologies; I’m working on it.
One of the reasons it’s so annoying is that it’s used as precisely the opposite of what the word originally meant. “Not in this present timeframe” is what “anymore” means, whereas the usage here is “in this present timeframe”.
A similar reversal occurs in “could care less” vs. the original “couldn’t care less”. Grrr.
I’m not sure this is a concern about grammar … shouldn’t it be characterized as a question of syntax, usage or idiom? In any case, the entire sentence makes me flinch a bit; I would reword it before allowing it into a publication I edited.
However, I do cut folks a bit of slack in their SDMB postings. If we insist that the standards of all the editors/writers/copyeditors/word mavens who haunt the Board be met, most ordinary people may as well stop posting now.
In other words, as a New Englander, I could care less about such usage in the SDMB, even though I agree the phrase in question has no place in a more formal setting.
I don’t like the usage because it’s confusing. I’ve never heard anyone in real life mean it the way it seems to be intended in other parts of the country - here it means “no longer” 100% of the time.
I think it’s associated with the American Midlands region, so Central PA and then west. The use of the positive “anymore” often appears on lists of “How to Tell if You are From Pittsburgh …”
This is very common in central PA (which definitely includes the York/Lancaster/Harrisburg region, and possibly a decent chunk of the northeast as well … ‘central’ tends to mean ‘not Philly and PBurgh’). Here’s an excerpt from an article that ran a few years back in the local PBS magazine, written by a small college linguist in the area.
This is similar to “momentarily” which seems to have acquired universal meaning of “in a short while” in the US (and such usage is creeping into the UK) whereas its original meaning is “for a short while”.
It makes my skin crawl for the reasons noted, but also because I almost always find it unnecessary in the sentences in which it appears:
It also seem to be quite recent, anymore.
It also seem to be quite recent.
What with the advent of miracle plastics, a lot more appliances are held together with nasty plastic tabby things than with screws anymore.
What with the advent of miracle plastics, a lot more appliances are held together with nasty plastic tabby things than with screws.
I’m on the West Coast, and I’ve only heard one guy say it, and he lives in Washington state. We were talking through an MMO and I had to reread his sentence before I understood it. My guess is he picked it up off teh intarweb.
I grew up in St Louis, where everybody talks funny, but I had never heard this usage until I moved to Kansas, and it took some getting used to. In fact, in college I had a girlfriend that would start a sentence with “Anymore”, rather than tacking it on at the end. That really got on my nerves.
I’m a graduate student in English and my specialty is grammar, so I couldn’t click on the title fast enough.
From a purely linguistic standpoint, “anymore” is unnecessary in both of the OP’s examples and, in the interest of clarity, should be deleted. If one of my freshman composition students submitted that sentence in a paper, I’d cross through “anymore” and note that there must be a better phrase than “plastic tabby things” – “plastic tabs”, for instance. I’m not sure, however, whether the extraneous word “anymore” is actually wrong or just less right than if it were deleted.
Also, when using “whether”, one normally leaves off “or not” if that is the only other possibility. “I don’t know whether it’s a regional thing” would be more correct than “whether or not it’s a regional thing”, since “or not” is the only other choice being offered. However, it would be perfectly correct to say, “I don’t know whether it’s a regional thing or an effect of Internet messaging.” This shows that the speaker is offering two choices from among several that may be possible.
This is a pet fascination of my husband’s – he’s a linguist. He’d never heard it growing up in New England; it was common in Washington State (where I grew up) and the Midwest (where all my relatives lived and where many Washingtonians have origins).
From a descriptivist point of view, this sense of “anymore” is useful as an intensifier, emphasizing a progressive normative change, invoking contrast with an earlier era, maybe with mild nostalgia. “These days” would be a synonym, but the latter hints more of a “You damn kids, get off my lawn!” perspective.
If it matters, I’m a professional grammarian; I help write grammar textbooks for high school students.
I’m quite surprised there have been no comments (other than my own) whatsoever about the first word of the OP sentence – “What”. The phrase “What with the…” is, I dunno, like somebody trying to sound like they’re from Jersey or Brooklyn or something.