I’ve noticed this one habit on this board and elsewhere recently. Rather than say “There’s a guy in my office who picks his nose”, people are writing “there’s this one guy in my office who picks his nose”. I would guess it comes from some spoken variant of English. Where’s it from? How come it seems to be catching on? (It’s not a very efficient usage, IMHO.)
While we’re at it. What’s the etymology of “suck” - as in “disco sucks”. That’s the first time I remember hearing the verb used as a term of disapprobation - back in the mid-late 70s.
(A self-indulgent thread, as it’s my 1,000th - I think - not counting the time several hundred vanished a few years ago.)
Well, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I hear people use “there is this one ___ in ___ that”/“there is one ___ in ___ that” all the time in regular speech. In fact, I’d venture a guess that whenever such a turn of phrase would fit, people around me will use it instead of the indefinite article. I personally use it, but rarely.
It’s colloquial, but it happens because you are thinking of “this one guy”, i.e., a specific guy, and not thinking about “a guy”, i.e., a generic guy. It’s perfectly grammatical, and not redundant at all. (However, many people, including my wife, will start a story with “this guy”, which annoys me, since in that form it needs a referent already given, and that referent is missing.)
I googled for the ‘sucks’ useage and this is the only appropriate one
I could find…
**Your Mother – Guestbook
you suck, you’ve never sucked so bad in Your life then you do right now and you
… Etymology: middle English, from old English, from late Latin spelta, … www.yourmother.com/guestbook/index.php3?page=3 - 269k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages
**
…but the link wouln’t let me in. Sorry
“Suck” has evolved in my lifetime. When I was a kid in the late 60’s/early 70’s if you said, “He/she/it sucks” you were making an oral sex reference. It was a bad word. Now my 11 year old son says that his teacher sucks.
Second one first: “You suck” was once a standard homphobic aspersion: “you are such a lowly specimen of mahood that you would stoop – er, kneel – to sucking on another male human’s meat flute for his pleasure.” As time went on, the expression strayed from its roots and now describes anything one doesn’t like.
“There’s this one guy…” is distinct from “There’s a guy…” in what isn’t said. “There’s a guy” has no unspoken content, but when one says “there’s this one guy…” one is really saying “Everything about the situation I’m discussing is unremarkable, but there’s this one guy…” At least, that’s how it sounds in my ears.