{"id":2948,"date":"2011-02-06T10:12:23","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T15:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2948"},"modified":"2011-02-06T23:33:39","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T04:33:39","slug":"absent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2948","title":{"rendered":"Absent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maureen Dowd's characteristically waspish review (\"Blame, not shame<\/a>\", NYT 2\/5\/2011) of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir (Known and Unknown<\/a><\/em>) begins like this:<\/p>\n

So many to blame. So little space.<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages \u2014 including a scintillating List of Acronyms \u2014 to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, \u201cKnown and Unknown,\u201d is like a living, breathing version of the man himself: very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We should note in passing MoDo's reflexive deployment of the phrasal template \"So many X, so little Y\". \u00a0I believe that this started with Miquel Brown's 1983 Disco hit \"So many men, so little time<\/a>\", though readers may be able to supply earlier influences. Versions of this pattern with substitutions for \"men\" are common in advertising, customers being offered mildly sexualized multiplicities of\u00a0choices, books, records, flavors, recipes, appetizers, dresses, carpets, toys, wines, beers,<\/em> and so on. Non-commercial examples include pedestrians, geckos, zebras, enemies, fingerings, oracle manuals,<\/em> and onward into an open-ended universe of immoderate aggregations.\u00a0Versions with Y=space are also common: a quick web search turns up space-limited multiplicities of lilacs, bikes, emotions, questions, shoes, snowflakes, letters, fallacies<\/em>, among many others.<\/p>\n

But what caught my eye was MoDo's use of absent<\/em>. This seems to be related to the version of the word that the OED calls a preposition, and glosses as \"(orig. and chiefly\u00a0U.S. Law.)<\/em> In the absence of, without\".<\/em> But all of the OED's examples of \"absent NounPhrase\" are adjuncts:<\/p>\n

1888<\/strong> Southwestern Reporter<\/em> 8 898 If the deed had been made by a stranger to the wife, then a separate estate in her would not have been created, absent the necessary words.
\n1933<\/strong> Columbia Law Rev<\/em>. 33 1155 Absent any mathematical terminology, the general formula achieved in the New York statute has much to commend it.
\n1953<\/strong> Federal Suppl.<\/em> (U.S.) 107 527\/2 Absent federal legislation upon the subject, states may, within limits of reasonableness, regulate the use of their highways.
\n1972<\/strong> N.Y. Law Jrnl. <\/em>24 Oct. 5\/3 Absent such an appeal, the constitutional issues were conclusively determined against Ender.
\n2006<\/strong> Daily Tel. <\/em>17 Mar. 23\/3 An Australian republic is not only not inevitable, but, absent some calamity, it will never come to pass.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this must be how I'm used to seeing it as well, since I was struck by the fact that Dowd uses it in a coordination of three predicatives: \"very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism\". \u00a0The other two are the adjectives\u00a0thorough<\/em> and analytical<\/em>; but a prepositional phrase is normal in such cases, and I wouldn't have batted an eye at \"… and totally without any credible self-criticism\".<\/p>\n

A quick web search suggests that predicative uses of (this sense of) absent<\/em> are Out There:<\/p>\n

She is absent any practical political experience.
\nThe non-corresponding ridge event was found during the course of routine casework by the author and is absent any clear distortion markers or red flags.
\nIt's easy to see how a vegan diet is absent any of these products.
\nTherefore, the federal government is absent any authority to dictate the terms of withdrawal from the Union, and as such, the States, and the States alone, decide the issue for themselves, as further guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment.
\nAgain, Article III is absent any grant of immunity to the judiciary, either express or implied<\/span><\/p>\n

However, such predicative examples seem to be rare compared to the adjunct examples. The COCA corpus has 46 instances of \"absent any\" — for an overall rate of about 1 in ten million words — and four of these are predicative, suggesting a rate of about 1 in 100 million words. There are 29 instances of \"absent some\", and just one of these is predicative.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0\u00a0in comparing the frequency of a word in different normal syntactic frames,\u00a010-to-1 or 20-to-1 frequency ratios are common. So it's puzzling that I apparently (unconsciously) interpreted the infrequency of predicative absent<\/em> (prep.) as evidence of a systematic as opposed to an accidental gap, and was therefore suprised by Dowd's predicative use. Perhaps, the OED to the contrary, I didn't really take this use of absent <\/em>as a preposition, but rather as some more specialized and limited way to create a certain kind of adverbial adjunct?<\/p>\n

[Update — Some evidence that Miquel Brown's 1983 hit was based on earlier popular culture, from Michael Coakley, \"Los Angeles<\/a>\", Chicago Tribune<\/em>, 8\/26\/1979:<\/p>\n

It was Friday night at a recently fashionable, overpriced French restaurant on Melrose Avenue, a favorite lane of the truly worthy. This is a fancy establishment, and at one table the diners were suitably attired, probably out from New York. Seated at the next banquette was a foursome, the two males more or less conventionally dressed, discounting the umpteen gold chains. The two women were in jeans, which is OK, too, since they were of the $85 continental variety. But the T-shirts were a bit much. They undoubtedly were not cheap either — in price. One was canary yellow and carried this inscription: \"So Many Men; So Little Time.\" The other one was pink and boasted two strategically placed pictures of the King Tut mask. The message beneath read: \"Don't Touch My Tuts.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Was this the work of some mute inglorious Milton of the T-shirt trade? Or did it reflect an earlier version of the 1983 hit song?
\nA Google Book search turns up this snippet from Playgirl in 1978<\/a>:
\n<\/a>
\nMy first throught was that Mae West had something to do with this, and some others on the net think so too, but her Wikiquote page<\/a> doesn't list it, and I couldn't find any credible attribution to her.]<\/p>\n

[Please note that this is not a writing clinic.\u00a0I'm not objecting to Dowd's usage of absent<\/em>, nor am I asking for suggestions about how to re-word her column. Rather, I'm interested in what sort of constructions the preposition-like absent<\/i> enters into, and how we learn what they are, given its rarity.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maureen Dowd's characteristically waspish review (\"Blame, not shame\", NYT 2\/5\/2011) of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir (Known and Unknown) begins like this: So many to blame. So little space. Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages \u2014 including a scintillating List of Acronyms \u2014 to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, \u201cKnown and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snowclones","category-variation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}