word choice - "Can I help who's next?"


This seems to happen every time I go to my local bagel shop. Everyone is waiting in a line, and when the cashier is ready to help the next person, he/she asks, "Can I help who's next?" or "May I help who's next?" This seems wrong to me, shouldn't it be "Can I help whomever is next?" or "May I help whomever is next?"



Answer



This construction is indeed peculiar. Contrary to what one of the other answers seduces us to believe, it actually is not quite analogous to "I know who shot him" and the like. Geoff Pullum over at Language Log explains why:



It's very important here to distinguish two separate structures for who's next. One of the two is an interrogative content clause, and that's commonplace. There is nothing remarkable about examples like this:



  • I wonder who's next.

  • Let's go and inquire who's next.

  • Who's next is completely unclear.

  • Who's next doesn't matter.


In all of these, the who's next is interrogative. [...]


Now, interrogatives often have exactly the same form as corresponding fused relatives [...]: a noun phrase constituent in which, in effect, the words the thing that (or the thing which, or that which) are fused into the single word what.[...]


In general, fused relatives with who just aren't used in contemporary English. In Shakespeare's time it was commonplace (recall Iago's remark in Othello: Who steals my purse steals trash; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands). It survived down to the 19th century. But it did not survive down to the present day.


Except in this peculiar use in coffee shops and the like, because in Can I help who's next? we have a fused relative construction: it's the object of help. [...]


Things are completely different if we consider not the lexeme who but instead the compound lexeme whoever. That (like all the wh + -ever words) is freely used in fused relatives. If I was hearing Can I help whoever's next? I wouldn't have written this post at all.



Emphasis added.


So why did this construction survive in some places? And in which? Geoff Pullum initially observed it in Rockport, Massachusetts. He later adds, "Lots of people have now written to me to confirm hearing or using the expression in coffee shops, bookstores [...], up to about fifteen years ago [that is, around 1990], especially in the upper Midwest, which could be the cradle of the phrase." At the same time, M. Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language fame has been hearing it "a lot in shops and cafés in Brighton". She picks the ball up from where Pullum left it and entertains some theories.



Some of you may be thinking "Ha! I knew that such ungrammaticality must be an American aberration imported into the youthspeak of Britain!" But by Pullum's account, this is not a new construction, but an old use of who that had been thought to be extinct for at least 150 years. So, what's going on here? Is it that:



  1. this use of who died out in most places but survived in little pockets of AmE and BrE and may be making a comeback?

  2. this use of who is a natural development in English grammar that has erupted on two continents at vaguely the same time after going out of fashion for a while?

  3. the phrase can I help who's next? is an idiom that was (re)invented in one country and found its way to the other?


In the UK, I'm mostly hearing it from younger people [...] I can't imagine that that many Marks and Spencer assistants/clerks spend a lot of time in the US picking up phrases that seem to be used by a minority of AmE speakers (not necessarily in the touristy areas). [... T]hat makes me lean against hypothesis (1). I'm liking (2), but really have no empirical evidence for it.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

Years and years ago, I remember reading in a book on AmE usage that the phrasal turn a baby creeps before it walks was to some extent more common to AmE than to BrE, which preferred exclusively the "crawl" version. And so, I just recently checked on the accuracy of that information on NGram Viewer , and it actually was fact... more than a century ago! What I would like you to tell is if it would sound sort of weird to hear someone say today in the US that a child "creeps" before walking and running (see Synonyms ) rather than it crawls. Also, what's the story to those terms? How did "to crawl" come to prevail and supersede "to creep" to describe the way a baby moves around? As with a plant, so with a child. His mind grows by natural stages. A child creeps before he walks , sits before he stands, cries before he laughs, babbles before he talks, draws a circle before he draws a square, lies before he tells the truth, and is selfish before he
Read more

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

Does this sentence have too many subjunctives? If it please the king, let it be decreed that they be destroyed, and I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who have charge of the king's business, that they may put it into the king's treasuries. I am stumped by this sentence construction. First, there is "Let it be," which is a common English idiomatic phrase, but then it follows another subjunctive. Is that to say you can actually have a subjunctive followed by another subjunctive? Also, why does the sentence use "please"? If that's the subjunctive tense there, then why is it followed by another subjunctive instead of a conditional, or maybe "Let it be" is the conditional? Lastly, I wish to know how the that is used in the sentence. Perhaps, the simplified sentence can be restated like so: Let it be decreed that they be destroyed and that they may put it into the king's treasuries. If not, maybe the simplified sent
Read more

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

I often see English notation about time using the " and ' symbols. I have always mistaken about the two, and even their meaning. I'm more used to "01:05:56", for example. How do you represent the hour, minutes, and seconds using the apostrophe and quotes punctuations? Which is for the hour, which is for minutes, and which is for seconds? Is it the common way to write duration of time elapsed? Do they have a special pronunciation? Answer It's not particularly common for expressions of time. It's similar to degrees-minutes-seconds: instead of decimal degrees (38.897212°,-77.036519°) you write (38° 53′ 49.9632″, -77° 2′ 11.4678″). Both are derived from a sexagesimal counting system such as that devised in Ancient Babylon: the single prime represents the first sexagesimal division and the second the next, and so on. 17th-century astronomers used a third division of 1/60th of a second. The advantage of using minute and second symbols for time is that it o
Read more

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

I've been reading William Manchester's book "American Caesar", which is about Douglas MacArthur, and I found that he uses a strange convention for pluralizing the family name. When talking about the MacArthurs as a whole, he writes MacArthur' with an apostrophe, as in "After the war, the MacArthur' lived in Tokyo while the general was proconsul" (yes, he uses that term to describe him). I have never seen or heard of a rule that would prescribe this. Manchester is a bit old-timey in his style: for example, he also writes "in behalf of" instead of "on behalf of", which is the only one I have ever seen. So perhaps this is similar. Where does he get this apostrophe from? Edit: There seems to be some difficulty finding examples, which is odd. Here is a direct link to a page from Google Books that shows the apostrophe.
Read more

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

What is the origin of the phrase shit eating grin ? How did it come to mean showing smugness or self-satisfaction of an individual's actions? Answer From the Urban Dictionary: ...these uses are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary no earlier than 1957 There have been similar expressions used quite far back: In Book XXI of his History of Rome, Livy describes a Carthaginian sect of coprophages, the risus faecivorus, or shit-eating grin, being commonly displayed by its adherents. Although, its origin is undetermined, they may have been incidents which caused the invention of this phrase. Below is an excerpt: "1944 Jrnl. Nerv. & Mental Dis. XCIX. 959 Among demented patients in advanced stages of their illness,..it is not rare to see some of them grasp their own feces, chew them and eat them often with great pleasure and satisfaction (coprophagia).
Read more

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

This is a phrase I’m particularly confused about, because it’s used often when something is manipulated or changed. For example, sometimes images surface online that are clearly Photoshopped, but people refer to them as “doctored” images. Why use the word “doctored” here? Answer The earliest Google Books match for an instance of doctored in a transitional (or perhaps post-transitional) sense between "amended" and "adulterated" appears in William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Glocestershire; Including Its Dairy: Together with the Dairy Management of North Wiltshire, and the Management of Orchards and Fruit Liquor, in Herefordshire , volume 2 (1789): Men in general, however, whose palates are set to rough cider, consider the common sweet sort as an effeminate beverage; and rough cider, properly manufactured, is probably the most generous liquor; being deemed more wholesome, to habits in general, than sweet cider:—even when genuine. That which is drank, in the kingd
Read more

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?

Fairy vs. faerie — which is the correct spelling? Answer As others have noted, fairy is the standard modern spelling, and faerie is a pseudo-archaism. However, in some contexts there is now a semantic distinction between the two spellings! In particular, fairy tales and the associated idea of fairies typically refer to the genre of folk stories printed by the Brothers Grimm, then sweetened and popularized for modern audiences by Disney et al. Faerie stories , on the other hand, are stories about the fae : otherworldly, unpredictable, and dangerous creatures who appear in the folk-tales and myths of England and Ireland. In origin, of course, the fairies and the fae are one and the same, but the connotations and usage of the words today are headed in opposite directions. A Google image search for fairy vs. faerie shows a lot of overlap, but some very significant differences in tone and content between the two terms. Note that the search for "fairy" turns up a number
Read more