Topic-fronting with “I know from”
Reading Barbara’s lovely discussion about “how local to go”, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence:
Cornmeal, we know from, but millet — to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed.
The “we know from” construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It’s a favorite of Sars. A few examples from her:
- The man’s baseball childhood was basically the 12 Stations of Richie Ashburn; Philly fans know from having to wait.
- I have spent time in New Jersey DMVs, so I know from annoying…
- I don’t know from ESL grammar…
- Moreover, Giuliani knows from art criticism like I know from sub-nuclear physics. [AG note: awesome]
- Say what you want about the guy off the field, dude knows from pitching.
I’ve been known to use it myself, although mostly self-consciously, to present a jokingly exaggerated portrait of my knowledge about some area. There are no uses of it in my blogging at all, so I can only suppose that I might say something like “I’m a linguist, so I know from dialects!” It’s a hard construction to search for on Google, because “know from X” is also the first part the standard structure “know from X that Y”, which is why I turned to Tomato Nation for examples.
I don’t really want to get into discussing the “properness” of this structure (some people hate it) or its origin. What really struck me about Barbara’s sentence, though, was the effect of combination with topic-fronting: Instead of saying “We know from X” (X = cornmeal), she writes “X, we know from”. This is just standard topic-fronting, which is a common discourse pattern.
But the combination of the two yields a sentence unusual enough to catch my eye, unusual enough that several people I sent it to said it seemed confusing to them, especially on first reading. Quite an interesting result.
Update:
Jesse points out in the comments that a more sophisticated Google search can find some examples, such as:
PS: Your iPod doesn’t know from romance
Barbecue? I know from barbecue…
Since Five I Know From Funny
You should be able to use -”know from * that” in your Google search to eliminate the structure you’re not interested in. If I search for
“know from” -”know from * that”
at least two of the first ten hits look like they are examples of the “know from” that you’re interested in.
Here’s an example that uses both a positive and a negative star phrase:
“all your * are belong to” -”all your * are belong to us”
Comment by Jesse Ruderman — July 16, 2008 @ 5:40 am
Your WordPress texturizer got confused by my quotes, but it seems like Google can handle the twisty quotes just fine!
Comment by Jesse Ruderman — July 16, 2008 @ 5:42 am
Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this construction before. Does “know from” basically mean “know about”?
Comment by Jonathan Ichikawa — July 16, 2008 @ 5:47 am
Jonathan — yes, basically, or “know a lot about, be very well acquainted with”. My understanding is that it originated as short way of saying that you can distinguish X from whatever else because you know a lot about X, but it must have evolved somewhat.
Comment by Alexis — July 16, 2008 @ 6:13 am
My assumption about the phrase had been that it was an imported Yiddishism, like “by [someone]”.
Comment by Pseudomonas — July 16, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
What is “by [someone]”?
There are some sites that seem to confirm this, the best of which gives:
“A number of Yiddish idiomatic constructions have also entered colloquial English, such as the pattern I don’t know from ___ (ikh veys nit fun ___)” [http://www.jewish-languages.org/yiddish.html]
This is most convincing because it gives the equivalent pattern, but it doesn’t explain why it means what it means.
However, the Metafilter thread confirms this from a number of people including languagehat, but one of the last comments gives the OED explanation which doesn’t clearly tie in the Yiddish.
It seems plausible that the origin is Yiddish and it was supported by the similar English constructions, as some of the MeFi commenters say.
Comment by Alexis — July 17, 2008 @ 3:29 am
Google tells me that topic-fronting is much more common in Yiddish than in English. I guess that makes “Cornmeal, we know from…” Yiddish in two ways ;)
Comment by Jesse Ruderman — July 17, 2008 @ 10:28 am
Jesse — awesome. Emphasis by topic-fronting did show up in a couple of those Yiddish pages now that I think about it.
Comment by Alexis — July 17, 2008 @ 10:43 am