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| How come . . . | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 12 2006, 09:27 AM (307 Views) | |
| kenny | Aug 12 2006, 09:27 AM Post #1 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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. . . we say "how come" instead of "why"? |
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| Optimistic | Aug 12 2006, 09:28 AM Post #2 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Beats me. |
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PHOTOS I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up. - Mark Twain We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S. Eliot | |
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| ***musical princess*** | Aug 12 2006, 09:37 AM Post #3 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Haven't got a clue. x |
| x Caroline x | |
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| Nunatax | Aug 12 2006, 09:39 AM Post #4 |
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Middle Aged Carp
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Yeah, why? I don't know...
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| You seem somewhat familiar. Have I threatened you before? | |
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| George K | Aug 12 2006, 09:55 AM Post #5 |
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Finally
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How come you spend your time thinking of things like this? You should be playing your Bluthner! |
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A guide to GKSR: Click "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08 Nothing is as effective as homeopathy. I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles. - Klaus, 4/29/18 | |
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| JBryan | Aug 12 2006, 09:55 AM Post #6 |
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I am the grey one
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Because "wherefore" fell out of fashion. |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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| AlbertaCrude | Aug 12 2006, 09:59 AM Post #7 |
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Bull-Carp
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Because many English speakers do. How come you asked that question Kenny? |
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| JBryan | Aug 12 2006, 10:24 AM Post #8 |
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I am the grey one
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Probably a shortened form of "how does it come to be" or something like that. |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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| DivaDeb | Aug 12 2006, 10:39 AM Post #9 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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from here The admittedly obscure-looking how come?, a colloquial Americanism for 'how is it that?' or 'why?', is based on a shortened form of an expression such as "how comes it that..." or "how did it come about (that)..." These still-somewhat-obscure phrases depend on a usually archaic sense of come meaning 'to come about; happen; occur; become', combined with an archaic word order placing "how" and "come" together at the beginning of a sentence. While this type of use seems rare now, it was once very common. A selection of examples showing this earlier use of how with come (not the same as our modern colloquial phrase) (some of this examples show slightly different structures, such as the Austen quote, which is "come about" in an archaic word-order): "How comes it then that he is prince of devils?" (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus); "How comes it that they travel?" (Shakespeare, Hamlet); "How comes it thus?" (Milton, Paradise Lost); "How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort?" (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding); "How comes it to be any concern of yours?" (Fielding, Tom Jones); "How comes this about; there must be some mistake" (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park); "How comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world?" (Melville, Moby-Dick); and "Then if it's so precious how comes it to be cheap?" (Henry James, The Golden Bowl). The American sense is derived from uses like these, and as the original phrase "how comes it..." has become difficult to understand, the expression how come has become more and more a set phrase. As we're familiar with it, how come first appears in John Bartlett's 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms, one of the important early books dealing with American slang and colloquial expressions. Bartlett's comments suggest that it was in widespread use when he wrote. |
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| Mikhailoh | Aug 12 2006, 10:44 AM Post #10 |
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
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Kenny.. go paint. Paint your own explanation of how this came about. |
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Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball | |
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| George K | Aug 12 2006, 10:55 AM Post #11 |
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Finally
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How come when someone here asks a question, there's always someone who knows where to look it up? |
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A guide to GKSR: Click "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08 Nothing is as effective as homeopathy. I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles. - Klaus, 4/29/18 | |
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| Mikhailoh | Aug 12 2006, 11:02 AM Post #12 |
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
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'Cause we're by and large a pretty astute bunch. |
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Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball | |
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| kenny | Aug 12 2006, 11:16 AM Post #13 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Thanks DD. ![]() Speaking of of astute . . . a fart is an ass toot. Isn't this from Shakespeare or something else astoot?:P |
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| iainhp | Aug 12 2006, 01:43 PM Post #14 |
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Middle Aged Carp
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I had a girlfriend who always said "whyfor?". |
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| Larry | Aug 12 2006, 11:41 PM Post #15 |
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
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I had one once whose ass always tooted. But we won't go into the details here..........
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Of the Pokatwat Tribe | |
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10:40 PM Jul 12