I pay a lot of attention to the ways people speak because words have always fascinated me. I continue to remember the day, nearly 20 years ago, when my father watched undergrads walking from downtown Athens onto the UGA campus and remarked, “There go the students entering into the portals of the university.” The turn of phrase has a certain sublimity. Not bad for a chemical engineer.
And just as some phrases are wonderful, some are less felicitous. I have noted the recent proliferation of people talking about “hand-carrying” things. For example, a gentleman on a radio commercial talked about how he had helped someone when he “hand-carried” the forms they filled out to the proper office.
I am waiting to see whether this way of speaking will catch on. Will we begin to hear about the time someone “mouth-drank” a bottle of water, “foot-walked” through the neighborhood, or “ear-listened” to a piece of music?
Impossible, you say? I thought the same thing a couple of decades back when I saw a couple of young guys wearing their pants about eight inches south of their waistlines.
April 12th, 2011 | 11:11 am | #1
Well sure, just yesterday I nose-smelled a taco before I ate it for lunch.
April 12th, 2011 | 1:15 pm | #2
Yes, but did you tooth-chew it? Or molar-mash it?
April 12th, 2011 | 2:29 pm | #3
I can’t believe what I’m eye-seeing!
April 12th, 2011 | 2:48 pm | #4
I can’t believe I hand-clicked my mouse to read this, or finger tapped my keyboard to respond. Face palm.
:)
April 12th, 2011 | 7:47 pm | #5
I always thought that hand-cooked potato chips would be painful…
April 13th, 2011 | 10:53 am | #6
Maybe it’s a regionalism. I’ve heard of hand-carried items for all my 50 years.
April 13th, 2011 | 11:05 am | #7
Nothing new to me, either. I think Ken’s probably right
April 14th, 2011 | 11:44 am | #8
Third for Ken and Tom.
It’s just shorthand for “by hand” instead of “by mail” or “by fax.” “Nose smelled” sounds silly because we never say we do anything “by nose” and we never distinguish smelling by nose from smelling any other way. But we say we do things “by hand” to distinguish our actions from the use of some arm’s length technology, all the time.
April 14th, 2011 | 12:00 pm | #9
I don’t think “hand carried” is a regionalism. Having lived on both coasts and now in the south I have heard it used in all those places. In addition to pentamom’s emphasis on the phrase meaning non-technological means being used, I think the phrase is intended to convey a further element of commitment on the part of the ‘hand-carry-er’.
When I hand carry a check today to a local church for shipment of Nicaraguan coffee I am doing so because I want to make personally sure that the funds get into the proper hands in a timely manner. ‘Hand carry’ seems to be a way of conveying the message “I (or s/he) really want to get this in the right hands at the right time and am taking the responsibility to do so…”
April 14th, 2011 | 1:45 pm | #10
Okay, so it’s a really BIG region.
Or, Mr. Baker lives in a cave somewhere and doesn’t get out much…
I kid, of course.
April 15th, 2011 | 2:09 pm | #11
Snail mail and hard copies would have made no sense in the 1960s.
Imagine a time when we drink things that we don’t want to taste and thus want to bypass our tongues, so we plug it into a little straw-jack on our stomachs to allow nutrition to go into our system immediately? If so, then saying you mouth-drank something actually has value.
Similarly, ear-listening would contrast with listening by way of some chip implanted in your brain that you can control to access your MP3s, whose content gets sent to your brain to experience as if you’d heard sound waves.
I suppose “foot-walked” could be a contrast with methods of transportation that we want to describe as walking where we don’t use our feet. I’m having trouble imagining what that might be, though. Should we envision people walking on their hands, with some technology to make such strange behavior actually viable for transportation over a notable distance? Or maybe we could say we foot-walked rather than walking while sitting in an imperial AT-AT.
April 18th, 2011 | 9:19 pm | #12
I’m forty and pretty well read and have only just begun to hear the phrase recently. I accept, however, that it may be in wider usage than I assumed. However, I cannot see any way to distinguish between the word carry and hand-carry. We carry things with our hands or on our backs or even sometimes on our head. Hand-carry adds absolutely nothing to the description.
April 24th, 2011 | 11:16 pm | #13
I agree. It sounds stupid to my ears. But it strikes me as stupid in the way that “snail mail” and “hard copy” sounded stupid to me the first time I heard them. Now they sound ordinary. The examples you gave as the height of silliness are at least imaginable to me as possible linguistic changes given certain developments.
April 25th, 2011 | 11:05 am | #14
“Hand-carry adds absolutely nothing to the description.”
As I noted above, by hand has a deeply established connotation of “not by means of technology.” Almost everything we commonly describe as done “by hand” also uses our hands if we employ some technology, so you could say in that case also that the word “hand” adds nothing to it. But it does, because we understand “by hand” to mean “non-technologically.”
Think of the analogous “hand sewn.” If you use a sewing machine, you’re still using your hands. And there’s no way to sew with your feet, or without using your hands in some way. So you could say that “hand” adds nothing to the “sewn” — except that it does, because it distinguishes it from “machine sewn.”
“Carried” is a little different because carried could itself imply non-technological transport, but in this case the hand adds not so much specificity, as emphasis. Think of someone saying “I made this myself.” “I made this” conveys the entire meaning, but “myself” adds emphasis and therefore clarity to the point. The “myself” is technically unnecessary, but no one would quibble with it, because it’s an accepted way of giving emphasis.
And I’d argue that regardless of what Hunter may not previously have heard, “hand-carried” has similarly been an accepted way of conveying that kind of emphasis lo these last couple of decades.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact