@grammargirl Help, please, to find examples of and to explain the "Y, but Y" rhetorical construction!
I had a sentence in a newsletter saying how someone was not getting enough credit for work when *** all, but all, *** of what we do now is based on their work. But it was unfamiliar to the editor, a native English speaker! I couldn't explain the reasoning behind it other than that I could swear it was widely used! I tried to search for examples, but it is hard to know what to search for.
@vlk I can't say I've never heard that construction, but it does sound uncommon to me. I'll try to remember to look in the OED when I'm back at my computer.
I did find a few more instances, notably of "always, but always," but buried in texts and used as just a throwaway phrase. None, but none, offered an explanation.
The evolution in the structure from 1920 to 2005 gives a clue perhaps -- there are supposed to be other contextualizing words that are subsumed in the later version for the sake of brevity. Though I can't quite figure out how to expand the latter to make it look like the former!
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