Statue of Humpty Dumpty by Kimber Fiebiger in Mesa, AZ |
...and writing for the Toronto Star under the pseudonym Bob Martin:
That's a great deal to make one word mean; to be precise, it's more than twice as much as the word brace means for the rest of us poor slobs. It must be fun to be Bob Martin—imagine reading, in some old novel or other, about two gentlemen fighting a duel with a brace of pistols, and trying to picture how they managed to hold them all. And what a feast a brace of pheasants would make! Impenetrability! That's what I say. |
A Roguish Chrestomathy - Humpty Dumpty is alive and well...
the pultaceous wisdom of a word weevil
28 Juni 2009 @ 13:00
Humpty Dumpty is alive and well...
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hah. i wonder if 'brace' is undergoing the slow creep of "couple" -- I have even caught myself saying "give it a couple of whacks" and meaning "some small plural number" -- three would certainly have been acceptable for me.
more likely this is the semantic equivalent of the over-read but under-verbalized people who don't know how to pronounce (e.g.) 'syncope'.
more likely this is the semantic equivalent of the over-read but under-verbalized people who don't know how to pronounce (e.g.) 'syncope'.
The thing about couple, though, is that the extended sense of the word includes the traditional sense—"a couple," in the informal sense of the word, means something like 'approximately two' (definitely more than one, but probably not much more than three). Martin's definition of brace, on the other hand, explicitly excludes the canonical meaning of the word; he's actually contrasting "a brace" with "two" here.
I like the analogy with the pronunciation of syncope; it looks to me as if Martin has simply taken brace to be one of those vague collective nouns like clutch or passel—which is, after all, a more likely-sounding meaning than 'pair,' in the same way that syncope looks rather as if it ought to have two syllables rather than three.
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This is definitely the first time I've ever heard of "brace" having a numerical meaning, whether two, four, or eight hundred and nineteen. I hope that you never need to brace yourself for the disappointment of not winning more than four awards.