Sooner than necessary

January 3, 2025 @ 8:58 am · Filed by under Grammar, Peeving, Usage

« previous post | next post »

From Philip Taylor:

Just received this in an e-mail message — sender: American male, born (maybe) early to mid sixties, attended Dartmouth 1984 (or thereabouts) onwards.

Thanks Hilmar. I'll review/install soonly. -k

Seeking clarification, I asked Philip:

The man's name is Hilmar?

What's he going to review/install?

Philip replied:

Hilmar is the name of the addressee (Hilmar Preuße)— the sender was "k", a.k.a. Karl Berry.  "k" is going to review "another set of patches for manual pages".

"Soonly" has been around since the late 15th century.

OED's earliest evidence for soonly is from around 1475, in Partenay.

It appears in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913.

Entry for this adverb in Wiktionary:

soonly (comparative more soonly, superlative most soonly)

    1. (nonstandard, dialectal or slang) Soon.

Quotations:

  • 2007, Willem Bilderdijk, Jan Bosch, M. van Hattum, Mr. W. Bilderdijk's briefwisseling, 1798-1806, page 155:
    I will entreat you, to do what's possible to finish this everlasting separation, which will kill me soonly, if not ceasing.
  • 1909, Wallace Irwin, “Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy”, in Collier's, volume 42, numbers 15-26, page xxiv:
    Dakota will soonly become one of them blissful married States.

Additional citations:

2012, Béatrice Knerr, Transfers from International Migration, page 49:

The Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR) and the then soonly formed Government of Aceh, which was elected after the signing of the Republic of Indonesia (RI) – Free Aceh Movement (GAM) peace agreement, coordinated the use of foreign aid to ensure that people's shelter and other basic needs were met.

2012, Fortune Garcia, The Last Eagle, page 30:

HE WILL OR SOONLY CONSTRUCT A GLASS HOUSE IN PYRAMID OR FORM A.

2015, Ian Whybrow, Little Wolf’s Haunted Hall for Small Horrors:

Here is a pic of Haunted Hall, the scaryest school in the world (opening soonly)

Reference:

Dieter Kastovsky, Studies in Early Modern English (1994, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN), page 244: Such pleonastic forms as oftenly and soonly can be found as early as the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and must be attributed to analogy. Incidentally, Dr. Johnson includes soonly in his 1755 Dictionary, […]

Karl Berry was at Dartmouth twenty years after me, but I never heard "soonly" when I was up there.

 

Selected readings

 

January 3, 2025 @ 8:58 am · Filed by under Grammar, Peeving, Usage


18 Comments »

  1. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 9:27 am

    But we already have the adverb, "soon"; wherefore risk synonymy with "soonly"?

    I say we give it a goodly burial… fastly.

  2. Nicholas A. Kaldis said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 9:35 am

    It’s not common heard in the part of Ohio where I come from

  3. Rodger C said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 10:47 am

    I like the Coverdale version: "and that right quickly."

  4. DaveK said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 12:26 pm

    Could the writer have made a mental slip for “soonest” which is a word ice seen, mostly in business correspondence as a brisk way of saying “as soon as I have the time.”

  5. Haamu said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 12:39 pm

    Of the quoted examples (leaving aside "He will or soonly construct," which I don't understand), the only one where I wouldn't just substitute soon for soonly is "the then soonly formed Government of Aceh." It almost makes me feel as though soonly might have some sort of use there. I'd be inclined to rephrase it as "the then soon-to-be formed" but undoubtedly not "the then soon formed."

    In terms of orders of magnitude, Ngrams suggests that soonly has been about 1/100000 as common as soon over the last few centuries, with some consistency other than momentary spikes in 1814, 1830, and 1915.

    I was at Dartmouth roughly 5 years before Karl Berry. I agree, it was not heard there.

  6. RfP said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 1:05 pm

    This sounds like a perfectly cromulent “hacker” nonce word from the heyday of terms like “kluge” (pronounced “kloodge” to rhyme with “stooge”).

    American programmers (at least) used to have an extremely corny sense of humor that could surface at odd moments. As we see here, IMNSHO.

  7. Philip Taylor said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 1:57 pm

    « terms [such as] “kluge” (pronounced “kloodge” to rhyme with “stooge”) » — I have read of that pronunciation before, but I know the word as "kludge", pronounced to rhyme with "judge".

  8. RfP said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 2:02 pm

    Maybe it’s a West Coast (of the US) thing, or American versus British English.

    It was a word I heard often in day-to-day conversation in programming environments in the eighties.

  9. Philip Taylor said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 2:29 pm

    The OED has the following to say of "kludge", admitting of "kluge" as an alternative (I have not bothered to retrofit most of the HTML/CSS markup) —

    Etymology
    Summary
    An arbitrary formation.
    J. W. Granholm's jocular invention: see quot. 1962$^{1}$ at main sense; compare also bodge v., fudge v.
    Meaning & use
    slang (originally U.S.).

    1962–
    ‘An ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole’ (Granholm); esp. in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or ‘bodged’ together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or ‘bug’.
    1962

    The word ‘kludge’ is..derived from the same root as the German Kluge.., originally meaning ‘smart’ or ‘witty’… ‘Kludge’ eventually came to mean ‘not so smart’ or ‘pretty ridiculous’.

    J. W. Granholm in Datamation February 30/1

    1962

    The building of a Kludge..is not work for amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true Kludge building.

    J. W. Granholm in Datamation February 30/2
    1966

    Kludges are conceived of man's natural fallibility, nourished by his loyalty to erroneous opinion, and perfected by the human capacity to apply maximum effort only when proceeding in the wrong direction.

    New Scientist 22 December 699/1
    1976

    The technique uses some kluge wiring, which must be carefully done to avoid shorts and noise problems.

    Electronic Design 5 January 120
    1979

    Kludge, a local modification or patch in a computer program to overcome some error or design fault.

    Personal Computer World November 71/3
    1983

    A well constructed and neat PCB with no obvious ‘kludges’ or last minute changes of mind.

    Australian Personal Computer September 43/2
    1984

    The QL is at last available..and without ‘kludges’ tacked on to make it work.

    Which Micro? December 21/4
    1987

    They have to get this performance with simple air-cooled designs, not with liquid-cooled kluges.

    Electronics 25 June 67

    computing
    U.S. English
    colloquial and slang

    Pronunciation
    British English
    /kluːdʒ/
    Forms
    Variant forms
    Also kluge.

  10. RfP said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 3:16 pm

    Merriam-Webster also prefers the kludge spelling, and indicates that the pronunciation that I am familiar with is standard in the US.

    Here’s their version of the etymology, likewise without the formatting:

    Although the origin of kludge/kluge is unestablished, two widespread conjectures about the word can probably be dismissed as dubious. It has no plausible relation to German klug /klu:k/ (when followed by a vowel in inflection /klu:g-/) "clever, intelligent." The meaning of the German word is different, and /g/ does not magically turn into /dʒ/. The second notion is that kludge/kluge was coined by Jackson W. Granholm, a columnist for the information science publication Datamation. Though Granholm wrote an article that undoubtedly led to the word's proliferation ("How to design a kludge," Datamation, February, 1962, pp. 30-31), kludge/kluge already existed. It has been claimed that Sperry Rand engineers referred to the Sperry Gyroscope division of the company as "Sperry Gyrokludge" no later than 1959 (see David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac [MIT Press, 1987], p. 45; obituary of Robert B. Forest by Eric Weiss in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 2 [1987], p. 71), but this has not been documented by a contemporary print reference. However, kluge with a somewhat different sense is attested a decade earlier in the article "Folklore from GI Joe," by Agnes Nolan Underwood (New York Folklore Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4 [winter, 1947], pp. 285- ). In recounting military folklore acquired from ex-soldiers in her classes, Underwood relates a shaggy-dog story about a sailor named Murgatroyd whose civilian occupation was "kluge maker." The meaning of kluge is withheld till the end of the tale, when the object made by Murgatroyd turns out to be "the damnedest looking little thing you ever saw—wires and springs sticking out in every direction." Murgatroyd then accidentally drops the object: "the kluge slipped out and went overboard, down into the ocean, and went 'kkluuge'." Two variants of this tale are related in letters to the editor of Infoworld (vol. 5, no. 3 [August 15, 1983], pp. 39-40). The onomatopoeic turn given to the word at the story's conclusion may or may not be its origin. The variant pronunciation with /ʌdʒ/, which may have arisen when the word was transferred from the military sphere to computer jargon, is undoubtedly expressive; compare BUDGE entry 2, DRUDGE entry 1, FUDGE entry 1, NUDGE, SLUDGE, SMUDGE entry 1.

  11. Philip Taylor said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 3:59 pm

    "the damnedest looking little thing you ever saw—wires and springs sticking out in every direction" — I used to make those as a child (roughly 1953–1956) and ino my family they were known as "complosials" (spelling highly uncertain — the word was only ever spoken, never written).

  12. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 5:42 pm

    RfP's theory that this is usage of "soonly" is not a direct revival or mysterious survival of 15th-century usage but a late-20th-century computer-subculture recoined jargon word, perhaps originally jocular, seems quite plausible to me, although I'm not clear on whether it's based on RfP ever having read/heard the word in that context previously versus just intelligent speculation.

    FWIW I have a cousin-once-removed who was at Dartmouth around the same time as Mr. Berry (graduated 1983, I believe), and I would be quite surprised if she used "soonly," at least non-jocularly. But she's not a computer-subculture person and there are probably other more definitely confirmed lexemes from that subculture's jargon that I would likewise find it surprising for her to use.

  13. RfP said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 5:59 pm

    @ JW

    It was pure speculation on my part—but certain nerdy subcultures enjoyed that kind of wordplay in that general time period.

    The kind of people, for example, who would obsess with their friends over Martin Gardner’s annotated versions of the Alice in Wonderland books.

  14. Chas Belov said,

    January 3, 2025 @ 8:50 pm

    This is the first I've encountered "soonly" in my long life.

    I've used kludge, with the moon vowel, much of my programming and quality assurance life.

  15. David Morris said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 3:02 am

    I can only interpret 'the then soonly formed Government of Aceh' as 'the then newly formed …'.

    By default 'soon' means 'soon after', but can be specified to mean 'soon before'. While it's possible to say 'the soon-to-be-formed government', I can't think of a similar construction for the past *'the soon-to-was-formed', *'the soon-had-been-formed' …

  16. jin defang said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 3:08 pm

    'soon' perfect as it is. Why add extraneous letters? Just because one can find the word used in the 13th century doesn't qualify it for use today. If you really want something even faster than soon, say 'asap.'

  17. Chas Belov said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 7:21 pm

    Just had a thought the I'd be okay with "soon-ish" which I'd expect to not be as quite as soon as "soon" but not much longer.

  18. Chas Belov said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 7:22 pm

    *that

RSS feed for comments on this post

Leave a Comment