SC has been watching with amusement the outpouring of interest at Language Log over Dick Cavett's thoughts on language. Aside from Mr. Cavett's status as a usage crank, there is an important presupposition in need of explicit cancelling, but your host will get there in a roundabout way.
When SC first started working for his present employer, in 1999, he was a mere 23 years old. The unspeakable horror known as Episode I had just recently been released, and so Star Wars nostalgia was a popular topic of conversation. At the start of a meeting where SC was the youngest person in the room by a good 20 years, several people expressed their memories of standing in line to go to the original movie. Mistaking an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut for a chance to perform some good-natured needling, your host promptly spoke up with, "I wish I remembered Star Wars coming out, but I was pushing 1 at the time".
It is in that spirit that SC gets to his point: who is Dick Cavett, and why should we care about his particular brand of usage crankiness? A cursory review of his biography on Wikipedia suggests that he formerly made a living as a comedian, a fact not at all evinced by his not-at-all funny debut column (there were some recognizable attempts at humor, but SC declined to laugh in order that the bar should be set at least high enough to limbo under). Rather like Star Wars, you seem to have needed to live through the '70s for Dick Cavett to have any sort of visceral appeal. Your host will at least credit him with having been funny at some time in the past, as Wikipedia also quotes him having said:
I went to a Chinese-German restaurant. The food is great, but an hour later you're hungry for power.
That actually did get a chuckle from SC, but then, he also likes the section on Hitler jokes from the Big Book of Jewish Humor. Not so good for Mr. Cavett's contemporary relevance.
But now to Mr. Cavett's work as a usage crank. Prof. Liberman remarks of him:
He does threaten that "if I ever find myself once again with the senator who spoke of his 'incredulous' experiences, I shall pop him one" -- but has anyone who said "I shall pop him one" ever actually done so?
The answer to the rhetorical question is obviously no, but not necessarily for the obvious reason. SC was actually...popped...more by the modal verb preceding that phrase than by the blustery use of the phrase itself. A Google search for "pop him one" turns up 507 hits; adding that "shall" in front drops it to 0, as does "must". "Might", "could", "would" and "should" all fared similarly, varying between 4 and 40 hits. Lesson: if you're trying to affect rough speech, using constructs that mark you as educated is a Bad Idea.
But then it occurred to SC that maybe Cavett's problem wasn't the "shall", but the "pop him one". Maybe he's stuck in a 1970s time warp where he's considered funny, and hasn't caught up with the more recent usage "tear X a new one" (where "one" is synonymous with a bit of posterior anatomy). With 718 hits, the usage rate on the web is pretty much comparable to "pop him one", so that's out (and oddly, the polite form of the new phrase gets 3x as many hits as the unexpurgated version). One thing that doesn't change, though, is the near-total absence of hits following modals -- 0 for "shall" before both forms, and just one for "must" before the aforementioned vulgarism. "Would" is the only modal to break 40 hits before "tear him a new one". So we can only conclude that despite Dick Cavett's declinist views about usage -- "I see it as a glass half empty — and evaporating quickly" -- some things haven't changed.
[A methodological note: Obviously, most (if not all) of the usages of both "pop him one" and "tear him a new one" that Google has catalogued couldn't predate the Web. A cursory inspection of the results from both searches suggests that the users are by and large different groups of people, but it's practically impossible to tell if the users of "pop" are uniformly significantly older than the users of "tear" from the web alone. I can't find a dictionary citation of "tear him a new one", and the earliest OED citation of "pop him one", with the dummy ditransitive object, is 1958. They're both contemporary enough that Google's corpus is probably not very different from what might be gotten from browsing popular literature of the '60s-'80s as far as "pop" goes, although strictly speaking, it's possible that people's knowledge of the newer form might influence how they use modals with the older one.]
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