A woman in Monticello, Florida, is bothered by the phrase “on tomorrow,” and feels that the word on is redundant. However, this construction is a dialect feature, not a grammatical mistake. It has roots in the United Kingdom and probably derives from the phrase “on the morrow.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “On The Morrow”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name’s Megan, and I’m from Monticello, Florida.
I had a question about a local phrase.
A local phrase in Monticello, Florida.
I think it might be a misuse.
It kind of drives me up the wall when I hear it, and I wanted to know whether that was a valid emotion to feel.
Oh, well, let’s hear it. Let’s find out.
It’s on tomorrow, and instead of saying, hey, I’ll meet you on Wednesday, I hear people saying, oh, we can do that on tomorrow.
And it definitely gets under my skin when I hear it.
And so that’s what I was talking about.
And there in Florida, you haven’t heard it elsewhere, maybe other parts of the South?
I haven’t ever heard it anywhere else.
Okay.
If you ever go to Georgia, you may encounter it there, the Carolinas and the Virginia, because it is known throughout the American South.
But the interesting thing is it has roots in dialects in the United Kingdom.
And so we’re pretty sure that some of those Scots-Irish folks that came over brought it with them to the New World.
My assumption was that it came from on the morrow, but I didn’t know if the use of it on tomorrow was considered grammatically correct.
I think that’s a really good idea that you’ve come up with, on the morrow, which is an old archaism, an old-fashioned way of saying tomorrow.
But it’s also patterned after on Tuesday or on Christmas or things like that.
So there are other ways to refer to time that you do use the preposition on.
And maybe there’s some borrowing there as well on the same pattern.
But you would just rather hear tomorrow.
I’m going to see you tomorrow.
I would just rather hear tomorrow.
And I’m from Illinois, so we have a different way of speaking altogether.
So this one was new to me.
I grew up in Tallahassee.
I’ve lived in Monticello for about seven years, and until I moved here, I’d never heard it.
Yeah, it’s a dialect feature.
I wouldn’t call it wrong so much as an unusual dialect feature, but it’s well chronicled.
It’s recorded in dictionaries.
It’s recorded by people who study dialect.
We know some things about it.
We’ve got 100-plus years of history, which kind of puts it well out of the common mistake category.
Yeah, so maybe you could just reframe it and think about Grant and me every time you hear it.
Yeah, do a little field work.
Just figure out how old they are, where they’re from.
Do they always just say on tomorrow or do they sometimes say on yesterday?
Because that’s another one.
I’ve heard on yesterday also.
And that one makes me like, that one like angers me.
It seems more wrong.
It just seems so wrong to me.
Channel that anger into science.
Do field work, you know.
Channel it into information gathering.
Use that anger.
But it’s a real dialect feature, and kudos to you for being observant enough to catch it and understand what you were hearing.
I don’t just catch it.
It produces strong emotions.
Thank you very much for listening to that for me, and I’ll keep an ear out for it for sure.
Excellent.
That’s what we want to hear.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
You know, it’s hard, that first instinct.
At the risk of saying something that we say a lot on this show, that first instinct is to say they’re wrong.
And your goal and my goal often is to get people to move one step, at least one step, beyond that first initial response.
Exactly.
Because that is not a valuable response.
It’s not very productive to say they’re wrong.
We’ve got to say, oh, why do they speak differently than me?
Right.
What are they doing?
Who are they?
What kind of learn about them and where they’re from?
Yeah.
And those are productive questions.
Exactly.
It’s like hearing a new interpretation of an old song.
I love it.
Yeah.
And we’re going to say it again.
You’re like, oh, in my family we said that old rhyme this way and you say it that way.
The world is full of wonder.
The world is full of wonder.
Share your wonder with us, 877-929-9673.
Email all your wonder to us to words@waywordradio.org.
And share your wonder on Facebook.
We’ve got a really active Facebook group there.
