Jaded on Safire

Barry Popik has an unapologetic agenda against William Safire. It's only partly personal. It's mostly decent scholarship. On the ADS-L he has identified the amateur linguist's most recent lapse.

Safire in his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine this week makes the following observation:

The warm old phrase you’re welcome is rapidly disappearing from the language of civility. Though the word welcome first appeared in “Beowulf,” the O.E.D. notes that the whole phrase surfaced in print in 1907. We have now come to the 100th anniversary of the birth of our acknowledgment of someone’s expression of gratitude.

I was driven to send the following message to him. He'll ignore it I'm sure.

...Beowulf may be the first documentation of the word. To argue otherwise would take more time and effort than a simple missive should require.

But I must take issue with your claim that 1907 was the earliest that the entire phrase "you're welcome" was cited. The OED does cite the line "You're quite welcome" in W W Jacobs work, Short Cruises. And that phrase does include the entire lexical bank of "you're welcome" though the extra quite interrupts the continuity of the phrase. No matter. We will accept this as an example of the entire phrase plus one word. This does however move us to acknowledge those citations (in the same OED entry) that predate the 1907 example. 300 years before Jacobs, Shakespeare wrote "O Apermantus, you are welcome" in Timon of Athens. About 600 years before that Caedmon's Satan contained the line you "sind wilcuman" which is perhaps too early to be easily recognizable. But clearly the phrase was around well before 1907.

I do understand that you then intend to identify the phrase as a salient (if waning) response to that most common expression of gratitude: "thank you." In that case a quick look at only the OED supports your claim. But you should not be so hasty to trust even such a lofty tome to be your only source. It is not a regularly updated work. You need not lower your sights to find an example that predates the OED's 1907 citation. Look to the Bard good sir. In Othello you will find the following exchange between Lodovico and Desdemona:

Lod. Madam, good night; I humbly thank your ladyship.
Des. Your honour is most welcome.

Use this information as you wish.

I'll let Mr Popik's comments sum up the judgment.

So what Safire is really saying here is that this is not the "100th anniversary of 'you're welcome,'" but that this is a poor researcher relaying obviously outdated information to an uninformed general public. This is a joke.
...
Doesn't The New York Times have any journalistic standards?

[Update:
Mr. Verb is also fed up. Read some of his thoughts on Safire over at his space.
]

"Thanks Lovely"--"Ask Lovely"

Is that how we would translate "Danke schön" "Bitte schön"?

On a web log I visit regularly someone left a comment regarding the amount of power produced by West Virginia coal, oil, and natural gas. She ended with "So America, you're welcome for the energy!"

For? When did you're welcome change its syntactic properties? On another day I might not have noticed this preposition. But something caused me to pause and think "which would I have said, for or to?"

Once I paused to think about it my literal side cried out "to! It's to! But there's a part of me that hears 'for' as appropriate. I wonder how I would respond if someone said "you're welcome" and I didn't know why. I'd probably ask "for what?" just as easily as "why?" But does that transfer to hearing it as "you're welcome for X"?

In that structure I find a literal paraphrase only in "I support your entitlement: I say so in reference to X." But that's an unlikely intention.

"You're welcome" has now become a parallel directive to "thank you"--both of them taking the same preposition.

I wonder if this has something to do with the tendency of people to respond to a "thank you" by repeating a "thank you" instead of offering the assurance "you're welcome."

"Thank you."
"Thank you."

So the speech act is separated from the context or subjuct of the speech act--and the relative role of the locutor/hearer to that context. What used to be I thank your for your offering and You are welcome to my offering has now become You are thanked /(regarding/for this interaction) and the simply restated You are welcomed /(regarding/for this interaction).

The new meaning of this exchange is then "I_recipient approve of this event" and "I_agent approve of this event."