When it comes time to saving the Constitution
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Some elderly guys in northeastern Georgia have apparently been plotting diverse and extensive mayhem, in ways that I personally found surprising (Scott Shane, "4 Georgia Men Arrested in Terror Plot", NYT 11/2/2011):
Four Georgia men who were part of a fringe militia group were arrested on Tuesday in what the Justice Department described as a plot to use guns, bombs and the toxin ricin to kill federal and state officials and spread terror.
The men, all aged 65 and over, were recorded telling an F.B.I. informant that they wanted to kill federal judges, Internal Revenue Service employees and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to court documents.
“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” one of those charged, Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, Ga., was recorded telling the informant.
“When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die,” he said.
What surprised me about this reported plotting, which apparently began with regular breakfasts at the Waffle House in Toccoa, GA, wasn't the discussion of guns, bombs, and toxins, which strikes me as all too predictable. (If this were Murderous Old Wingnuts Log rather than Language Log, I'd explain at greater length.) Instead, I was taken aback by Mr. Thomas's choice of complement structures.
The English word "to" lives a double life. Sometimes it marks an infinitive verb ("To Kill a Mockingbird), and sometimes it's a preposition ("To Infinity and Beyond"). So I figured that "When it comes time to saving the constitution" was a blend of a phrase where to is part of a prepositional phrase in the complement of come ("When it comes to NOUN PHRASE") and one where it's part of an infinitive in the complement of time ("When it's time to VERB PHRASE").
Or maybe it was a blend of that infinitive complement of time ("… time to VERB PHRASE") and a prepositional-phrase complement of time ("… time for NOUN PHRASE"). Or maybe all of these alternatives are somehow exerting an influence jointly.
Whatever the source, I figured this was a slip of the tongue on Mr. Thomas's part, or a slip of the ear on the part of the FBI's transcriptionist. But a bit of internet search suggests that in fact it's a sort of mutant idiom, floating around out there in the linguistic meme pool — and that something interesting is going on in the process that creates and maintains it.
In the COCA corpus, there are 232 examples of "it comes time to", and in nine of them, what follows "to" is a VERB+ing form. One of these from a 2006 interview with George W. Bush, easily available on the web ( "George W. Bush Delivers Remarks on Health Care", 2/15/2006):
The new bill I signed is one which will make the states — give states a lot more flexibility when it comes time to signing up people — designing eligibility standards, to providing what the programs ought to look like.
The other eight examples also involve the -ing form of verbs (what CGEL calls gerund-participles): putting, making, voting, sending, reselling, reaching; e.g.
The No. 15-area-ranked Falcons hope a third straight lopsided loss to Katy doesn't damage their psyche when it comes time to making a playoff run.
South Dakotans are really an independent spirit when it comes time to sending people to Washington.
The poor American consumer has to choose between five or six new movies every single weekend, and so, unfortunately, when those movies die, they're not really worth what somebody who ran numbers thought they were worth when it comes time to putting them on television in Germany or on video in Japan.
There are 324 instances of "it came time to X", and 1 where X=VERB+ing:
As far as reducing our deficit, I think that we have to do is to try to see to it that whatever it is that needs to be done with our deficit gets done so that one day we can look back and tell our kids and tell our grand kids and tell our grand kids' kids that when it came time to doing something about our deficit that we did whatever it was we thought we had to do at the time.
So this is a relatively low-frequency memetic variant — 10 out of 556, or about 1.8% of the instances of "it comes|came time to X" — but 1.8% is not nothing. And further web search turns up plenty of examples in reasonably formal settings:
Andy Rathbone, Windows 7 for Dummies, 2009:
But when it comes time to finding a particular photo days later, that system breaks down quickly.
Ann M. Jobs, "American want cleaner cars, they just don't want to pay the price", AP News: 6/25/1998:
When it comes time to reaching into their wallets, even younger people who are thought to be more environmentally conscious aren't eager to part with extra bucks for their new vehicles, according to automaker surveys, Vines said.
David M. Brown, Transformational Preaching: Theory and Practice:
I can never get enough of these kinds of useful resource materials — they are invaluable when it comes time to putting a sermon together!
And this is not entirely a recent phenomenon:
"Report of Secretary-Treasurer Gleeson", Bricklayers, Masons, and Plasterers International Union of America, 1920:
It is a very easy matter for the extremely radical members of our organization to get us into trouble, but they are never around when it comes time to getting the organization out of trouble.
But again, almost all of such examples are of the form "when it comes time to VERB+ing". In contrast, when we look at the idiom "when it comes to X", where "to X" is a prepositional phrase and X is therefore a noun phrase, the situation is quite different. Here — one of the putative sources of the blend — the VERB+ing value for X is only about quarter of the total, with lexical nouns being nearly three quarters.
The COCA corpus has 11,180 instance of "when it comes to". I picked a random sample of 100 from this list, and of the 100, only 26 were of the form "when it comes to VERB+ing":
I think they want so much out of boys when it comes to reading, and they're not ready.
When it comes to fighting and getting women, I was way ahead of the curve.
These are the tricks of the trade when it comes to installing an attractive and stable book nook.
Nearly all of the rest (68 of 72) were completed by noun phrases headed by regular nouns rather than gerunds, e.g.
The trouble is, for kids and parents both, when it comes to toys, there is no enough.
It's hard for a girl like me to know where to begin when it comes to a thing like physical fitness.
But many people are inconsistent or contradict themselves when it comes to their right-to-life views.
The (few) others were WH-phrases or other sentential noun-substitutes:
But when it comes to,' My mom snores, and my wife snores,' it's more of a joke.
When it comes to what his subjective motivation was, what the president actually believed, however successful he ultimately might have been in walking that line, all he can do is to state what that was.
Thus, the mere presence of women doesn't solve the problem of gender bias when it comes to who is most capable of possessing and delivering information and ideas.
Despite this, things of the form "when it comes time to X", where X is a noun phrase is headed by a lexical noun, are extremely rare. Thus we commonly see things like "when it comes time to acquiring a new vehicle", but rarely things like "when it comes time to (the) acquisition of a new vehicle".
There are a few examples where writers seem to take "when it comes time to the NOUN" as equivalent to "when it comes to the NOUN":
A Pro-Mix HP soil is a worry free medium to use in an indoor grow operation. Its very good for beginners and honestly better when it comes time to the quality and quantity of the finished product. (Cannabis Botany: Naturally Medicinal Marijuana Horticulture)
Fair or not, there is a double standard when it comes time to the physical appearance (and thus exercise habits) required of fitness leaders.
And there are a larger number of examples where "when it comes time to the NOUN" seems to be taken as equivalent to "when it comes time for the NOUN", or maybe "when it comes times to do the NOUN".
The new team is none too impressed with Cutler's methods and give him a hard time back, but when it comes time to the real mission, they pull together.
Hopefully Apple can come up with a better transition than a fade when it comes time to the release.
This will be seen to have special relevance when it comes time to the analysis of some innovative strings having the structure N + [ADJ + N] (Michael D. Picone, Anglicisms, Neologisms, and Dynamic French)
But this sort of thing is relatively rare, as shown by the fact that among the 232+324 instances of "when it comes|came time to X" in COCA, there are 9+1 instances of X=VERB+ing, but no examples at all where X is a noun phrase headed by a lexical noun.
So the pattern "…when it comes time to VERB+ing" seems to me to be teetering on the edge between a mistake — a multi-way blend of "comes time to VERB", "comes time for VERB+ing", and "comes to VERB+ing" — and a new construction.
And it seems that either the multiple blend sources or the quasi-idiomatic status is a critical factor here, because the simpler pattern "… it's time to|for X" seems hardly ever to recombine in the same way. COCA has 4900+1230+2561=8,691 instances of "it's time to X", "it is time to X", or "it was time to X"; but only 1 lonely instance of X=VERB+ing, one that frankly seems like an editing error to me:
So you've got your target list. Now it's time to selling. Think a minute before you pick up the receiver. Do you know anything about the people you'll be calling?
Compare the 10 of 556 examples of X=VERB+ing in "when it comes|came time to X" — (10/556)/(1/8691) = 156 times more common. Or the 9 of 232 in "when it comes time to X" — (9/232)/(1/8691) = 337, or maybe (9/232)/(1/4900) = 190. It's not clear exactly what frequencies to compare, and a count of 1 is not going to give us a very reliable frequency estimate anyhow, but we can conclude that the probability of this "mistake" (to in place of for, or VERB+ing in place of VERB) is enhanced by a couple of orders of magnitude in "when it comes time to X" compared to plain "it's time to X".
So again, "when it comes time to VERB+ing" has become a new idiom, at least to some degree and for some people. Could this be the thin edge of a wedge of syntactic change, creating a new kind of complement structure? I doubt it; but stranger things have happened.
BobC said,
November 4, 2011 @ 7:45 am
"…comes time to (VERB)ing…" just doesn't sound right to my ear. "…comes time to (VERB) …", yes; "…comes time for (VERB)ing …", yes. But not "…comes time to (VERB)ing …"
J.W. Brewer said,
November 4, 2011 @ 8:20 am
Wait. Is Secretary-Treasurer Gleeson's use of "come" rather than "comes" a typo or a subjunctive?
[(myl) A scribal error on my part. Fixed now.]
Jon Weinberg said,
November 4, 2011 @ 9:02 am
My first reaction, when I saw "it comes time to VERB+ing", was that "it comes time to be VERB-ing" might be exerting an influence. But in the COCA corpus, there are no hits for "it comes time to be VERB-ing". So I guess not.
Eee said,
November 4, 2011 @ 9:32 am
For me, "it comes time to VERB-ing" sounds wrong, and "it comes time to VERB" sounds right. I use the "it comes time" construction in my daily speech occasionally, and so does my dad and other older people where I grew up (rural central Pennsylvania). I can't remember any of them using the -ing form of the verb, but I admit I've never listened that hard for it.
As I hear it in my head, the construction "when it comes time to VERB" has the equivalent meaning of "when the time comes to VERB", and hence takes the naked form of the verb.
Is there any chance that this has some sort of Germanic origin? I'm not a linguist (just an untrained reader of the site), and I don't know any German, but I know that a lot of the weird constructs used by some of the older people in my area come from the different word ordering rules of German.
Robert Coren said,
November 4, 2011 @ 10:04 am
"When it comes to VERB-ing" sounds perfectly natural to me, so I don't find it particularly surprising that it would get blended with "When it comes time…".
Kai Samuelsen said,
November 4, 2011 @ 10:38 am
Is this how grammaticalization begins? Something starts as a mistake, as a blend between two idioms, and eventually becomes productive?
For the first time ever, and only looking at this specific example, I feel sympathy for prescriptivists.
marie-lucie said,
November 4, 2011 @ 10:39 am
"When it comes to VERB-ing" also sounds natural to me (in Canada), but "When it comes time …" sounds unusual: I would expect "When the time comes" (to VERB, or for VERB-ing), or "When there comes a time …" (the latter more formal).
Bob Lieblich said,
November 4, 2011 @ 10:43 am
If we had an American English Academy, this sort of thing would be strangled in its crib. But of course it's Americans' First Amendment right to say anything they want any way they want. So when it comes time to objecting to this new construction, we'll just have to putting up with it.
Cy said,
November 4, 2011 @ 10:51 am
It was always my naive impression that this was actually an old form that was dying out – I seem to usually hear it from the elderly and people wanting to sound "folksy," like the third person singular simple-past form of "come" in "he come down the hill hollerin'", not that they're related at all, but they seem to occur together, esp. with older folks from midwest->south (I say with absolutely no proof).
Mr Punch said,
November 4, 2011 @ 11:06 am
This appears to me to be a conflation of "when it comes to saving" and "when it comes time to save" – but "that means" would seem not quite right (though perhaps natural in speech) in either case. "Then" would work, I think.
ironhorse said,
November 4, 2011 @ 11:34 am
Another possible source of interference: "When the time comes for verbing,…"
Chris Waters said,
November 4, 2011 @ 11:43 am
Come to think of it, "comes time" is a pretty odd duck to start with. "Come" is almost always intransitive–I can't think of another noun that can serve as its object. So it's not actually all that surprising to me that the phrase is evolving in new and unusual directions. It seems fairly unusual to start with, for all that it's common and perfectly standard.
My initial reaction to "it comes time to VERBing" (like several other people's) was: that's wrong. I'm absolutely fascinated to find that it may be a nascent language change instead. But the more I think about it, the more plausible it seems. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me coming back to LL.
Eric P Smith said,
November 4, 2011 @ 12:50 pm
@Chris Waters: In “it comes time”, time is not the object of comes, but its predicative complement, just as in “it is time” or “it became time”.
Charles Gaulke said,
November 4, 2011 @ 12:53 pm
In writing, "comes time to VERB-ing" would seem like such a straightforward editorial (search & replace?) error – someone started with "comes time to VERB", decided they wanted "comes to VERB-ing", and messed up the change. I'm not convinced it isn't just a mental version of that when it occurs in speech, I've gotten caught changing gears mid-phrase myself.
Does anyone actually produce this construction consistently in speech? Has Herman Cain, say, ever been recorded using it before? It would be interesting to see a comment from someone who actually doesn't find this usage unusual…
Kathleen said,
November 4, 2011 @ 2:30 pm
I'll add to the anecdotes. I'm from Arizona, and educated in the US west and midwest. I currently live in Pennsylvania. My linguistic upbringing was quite prescriptivist, and many slang/informal uses sound very odd to me. But not this one. I'm not sure that I actually say anything like "When it comes time to exercising" or "When it comes time to shopping," but then again, I'm not sure that I don't. I'm absolutely positive that it wouldn't stand out to me if I heard someone else say it.
On an unrelated note, the phrase "Murderous Old Wingnuts Log" made me laugh out loud. When it comes time to making jokes, Mark Liberman takes the cake!
marc said,
November 4, 2011 @ 4:17 pm
Mis dos centavos: "comes time to VERBing" is a general comment about an action, as in "when it comes time to getting out the vote, we have to recruit volunteers" (every four years, etc.). But "comes time to VERB" is a particular instance of the action, as in "when it comes time to walk out onto the stage, the director will give you a signal."
That's not a hard-and-fast rule, but I don't think I'd ever reverse those two uses.
…and a rant:
The casual partisanship kinda ruins an interesting post. Most rightwingers (I'm not one, btw) don't believe killing people is a solution, and whatever fringe there is that does believe that is mirrored among leftwingers (I'm not one, btw) (cf. Weather Underground, etc.). It would be wonderful to live in a world where one side of the political spectrum had the monopoly on morality and intelligence its adherents believed it had, because then that side would win. We don't live in such a world, however, and the quicker people on both sides of the political divide wise up to that fact, the quicker we can start fixing problems. In the meantime even people who are just interested in language (me) can't seem to escape to the smug self-righteousness of partisan self-congratulation in posts to a blog that's supposed to be about language, fer chrissakes. Blech.
/rant
[(myl) In fact, I have a generally positive attitude towards well-armed rural rightwingers, but it's neither partisan nor casual to think that these guys took their rhetoric a couple of notches too far, and (with a push from a silly novel and probable encouragement from government agents) might have been on the path to the random murder of innocent people. And I'll continue to think that both morality and intelligence are in short supply among those who think that the way to save the nation is to dump ricin out the window of a car on I-495, no matter what their political allegiances are.]
Nathan said,
November 4, 2011 @ 6:08 pm
@marc: I'm a rightwinger (of the less colorful, non-killing variety), and I don't see the "smug self-righteousness of partisan self-congratulation" that you saw in the post. The folks in question apparently are murderous old wingnuts. That doesn't hurt my political feelings. And the language issues are very interesting.
Ø said,
November 4, 2011 @ 8:10 pm
"Wingnut", whether in the hardware sense or otherwise, is such a great word that I can't fault anyone for using it. The same goes for "turnbuckle".
Will said,
November 4, 2011 @ 9:27 pm
He was quoted differently at http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/georgia-militia-plot-affidavit-1214918.html (which was linked to in the post body as "regular breakfasts at the Waffle House in Toccoa, GA"):
Two differences here. "Comes to saving" here vs "comes time to saving", and "gotta" here vs "have got to".
[(myl) As often noted here, journalists are surprisingly cavalier about direct quotes. One of the other logical combinations of these two features is also out there, e.g.
(link): "When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die," an arrest affidavit quotes one of the defendants as saying during one recorded conversation.
I haven't been able to find the "arrest affidavit" that's given as the source. Of course, there's no guarantee that the FBI transcriptionist got it exactly right either. In evaluating quotes as well as crimes, we should reserve judgment until proof is offered.]
Don said,
November 4, 2011 @ 9:55 pm
Could this be an eggcorny version of "when it comes down to . . ."?
JB said,
November 5, 2011 @ 12:03 am
The Weathermen disbanded in 1973. What does the etc. in "Weather Underground, etc." refer to? I don't think there is equivalency at each end of the political spectrum when it comes time to… oh, never mind.
marc said,
November 5, 2011 @ 7:14 am
Nathan, to me "all too predictable" contains all of that. ("Right-wingers? Murderous, obviously.")
JB: This isn't the place to educate people about leftist violence in the US. Google is your friend. (Cf. also every single IMF, G20, etc. protest over the past two decades.)
LDavidH said,
November 5, 2011 @ 8:56 am
@Chris Waters & Eric P Smith, a late comment from an ESL speaker: I also think that the original phrase "comes time to" (whether VERB or VERBing) sounds weird. It was obviously not included in any of the books I used to learn English, nor does it feature (AFAIK) in the speech of my English wife and children. I've only ever heard "when it's time to". But now I'll keep my ears peeled…
J.W. Brewer said,
November 5, 2011 @ 9:01 am
In terms of the oddity of "time" appearing as if an object (or something similar) for the typically-intransitive verb "come," consider the peculiar construction seen in, e.g., "come morning," "come Sunday," "come next payday," "come the revolution," etc. In each case, "come X" can be paraphrased "when X comes." "When it comes time" can similarly be reordered into "When the time comes." In my dialect, I still think it ought to be "When the time comes to VERB," with "VERB-ing" being ungrammatical in that position (although you can swap "for VERB-ing" for "to VERB"), but maybe this helps illuminate the oddity of "come" at least superficially appearing to act transitively.
Jamie said,
November 5, 2011 @ 9:17 am
Although I have never come across a construction like "when it comes time to saving" before, it sounded odd rather than "wrong"; I knew exactly what was meant and, for a moment, couldn't work out a more natural phrasing (or how it might have been derived).
The "when it comes to the time to" explanation seems to fit the intended meaning best (or, perhaps, "when it becomes time to").
Trimegistus said,
November 5, 2011 @ 10:46 am
Marc: remember, to liberals, violence on the left is simply unpossible. It doesn't happen, and when it does happen, it immediately vanishes from memory. That's why a language blog devotes space to right-wing violence — which, of course, didn't actually happen — rather than the word salad pronouncements of the leftists currently engaging in wholesale violence in Oakland and elsewhere.
JB said,
November 5, 2011 @ 12:11 pm
@marc
This is, indeed, not the place to discuss the violent proclivities of political extremists. My comment was meant to be dismissive rather than substantive. I won't promote non-linguistic discussion here ever again.
Also, if the IMF, G20, OWS, etc. protesters have conspired to murder officials of the federal government, I missed the news reports about it, and I take back everything I said.
J F Foster said,
November 5, 2011 @ 1:53 pm
A little reminiscent of something that happens in Welsh this is. Welsh has only one verbal noun, more comparable with the English present participle than anyother English form, and used to form the periphrastic present in both Modern Written and Modern Spoken Welsh. So
Dwy i fynd ….. = literally
Am I going… i.e.
'I am going….'
Remember, Celtic languages are VSO (with possible exception of Breton, which I'm not sure has a Basic Word Order.)
Past is the same with the preposition "wedi after'
Dwy i wedi fynd…..' I'm after going…..'.
There is a usage however in Welsh sometimes called an "infinitive" with the preposition "i" 'to' with the verbal noun. And "i" definitely means 'to", not 'for' — that's the preposition "am".
So in this line (irrelevant parts ellipted) from the folksong "Fflat Huw Puw" 'Sailing Barge Hugh Pugh" we find this:
Mi brynai'i ……….sgidie bach i dawnsio..
Affirmative buy-I shoes little to dancing….
"I'll buy little dancing shoes…'
i dawnsio = 'to dancing". It can't possibly be "to dance" because the noun is "dawns" while "dawnsio" is the verbal noun.
Dwy'i wedi dawnsio means "I danced", i.e.
'I am after dancing…."
J F Foster said,
November 5, 2011 @ 1:59 pm
Wps! In my note directly above, the preposition "i" triggers a "soft mutation" in the initial consonant of the next word, so it should read
"i ddansio", where orthographic *dd* is the voiced interdental.
JFF
Janice Byer said,
November 5, 2011 @ 4:23 pm
Reportedly, while churning butter, women on both sides of the Pond used to chant, over and over, the following "work song":
"Come butter come,
Come butter come,
Peter standing at the gate
Waiting for a butter cake
Come butter come"
Joseph said,
November 6, 2011 @ 11:05 am
I am a British speaker and I feel some similarity with the expression "to call time on" something.
To try to spell it out, the similarity is that "time" is appearing, anarthously, as element of the clause denoting a point in time which is crucial in the history of some object or action referred to in a following phrase.
marie-lucie said,
November 6, 2011 @ 2:41 pm
Joseph, how about an example or two?
Joseph said,
November 6, 2011 @ 3:51 pm
For somebody "to call time on something" means they say that it should end or bring about its ending.
Some examples from a Web search:
"Microsoft prepares to call time on Zune"
"Ekin latest Basque group to call time on activities"
"Scientists ready to call time on GMT" – a pun
A lot of uses are alcohol-related, which may be because the expression may come from the practice of a bartender calling "Time!" when a bar is about to close:
"Bromyard landlord forced to call time on beer garden"
"Drink watchdog set to call time on strongest beer ever brewed in UK"
The meaning is different though: rather than it being time for something to happen, it is time for something which has been happing to stop happening.
marie-lucie said,
November 6, 2011 @ 10:41 pm
Thank you, Joseph. So it is from "call 'Time!'", not at all the same structure as "it comes time" meaning "the time comes".
marc said,
November 7, 2011 @ 6:58 am
Joseph, that's an interesting phrase. The closest to something like that that an American might say is to call time-out (which just means to pause, not to stop, obviously), which is why I would've interpreted all those examples as pausing (production of the Zune, for example) and not stopping it.
marc said,
November 7, 2011 @ 6:59 am
And a question for the moderators: I assumed telling other commenters they're spouting bullsh*t and should shut up would be a no-no on this site, but does SimonMH get a special pass because his "rhymes" are so inane? Here's another sampling from his oeuvre.
In Memory of Comrade Stalin
Comrade Stalin!
To the workers you're a darling.
You led the proletarian state
that beat the fascists – good on yer mate!
That's why the parasites hate you
and all their histories slate you.
http://simonmhunter.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-memory-of-comrade-stalin.html
[(myl) Our comments policy doesn't say anything about bad poetry, though perhaps it should. But the only content of SimonMH's cited comment-poem was generic invective, so I've deleted it, as I would have done earlier if I'd read it.]
marc said,
November 7, 2011 @ 8:43 am
Thanks for the clarification. You can delete my question-comment, too, since it now refers to nothing, if you want.
SimonMH said,
November 7, 2011 @ 12:39 pm
Not the only content, surely? There were two topical examples of 'when it comes time to' in the verse (which I agree would be unlikely to win any literary prize). I think on grounds of relevance the doggerel should stand, despite the wounded wingnut feelings…
Rod Johnson said,
November 7, 2011 @ 4:43 pm
I liked "whataboutery" personally.
belenos said,
November 11, 2011 @ 7:55 am
Is this not a merger of "When the time comes to" and "When it comes down to", taking the latter's noun phrase rather than the former's verb?
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