Are We All Ready for Already?
Friday, October 15th, 2010Dianne Ericson recently questioned the good Doctor’s use of the word all in his treatment of the Good Word already. Here is what she asked:
“In your example today, ‘The children were all ready and bundled up warmly to go caroling on the snowy evening,’ is all really an adjective, or is it an adverb modifying the adjective ready? If it were a discrete adjective, then the sentence would still make sense if the adjective ready were omitted. I’m afraid that doesn’t quite work.”
In this particular sentence all is an adjective modifying children. We can’t say, “The children were all” (unless you are Pennsylvania Dutch, in which case it means “there were no more children”) but we can say “The children were all (ready, gone, happy, reasonable, crying, etc.)”
The oddness of this sentence comes from the fact that all is misplaced. It is an idiosyncrasy of the adjective all that it may be placed in the predicate even though it modifies the subject. “The children were all ready” is synonymous with “All the children are ready.”
We all especially appreciated this note, which Dianne was kind enough to add to her question:
“Thanks for all the wonderful help. Thanks to you, my child has the best vocabulary in her 8th-grade class!”
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