I pay a lot of attention to the ways people speak because words have always fascinated me. I continue to remember the day, nearly 20 years ago, when my father watched undergrads walking from downtown Athens onto the UGA campus and remarked, "There go the students entering into the portals of the university." The turn of phrase has a certain sublimity. Not bad for a chemical engineer.
And just as some phrases are wonderful, some are less felicitous. I have noted the recent proliferation of people talking about "hand-carrying" things. For example, a gentleman on a radio commercial talked about how he had helped someone when he "hand-carried" the forms they filled out to the proper office.
I am waiting to see whether this way of speaking will catch on. Will we begin to hear about the time someone "mouth-drank" a bottle of water, "foot-walked" through the neighborhood, or "ear-listened" to a piece of music?
Impossible, you say? I thought the same thing a couple of decades back when I saw a couple of young guys wearing their pants about eight inches south of their waistlines.
I am not sure I wholly approve of “entering into a portal”. Doesn’t one enter something else (in this case a university campus) through a portal?
Where I live, “hand carried” emphasizes that the person took extra pains to see something through and be responsible for it, to the extent of physically running it through the desk gauntlet, as opposed to supervising the task, or mailing the letter, or whatever.
Interesting piece of yours I just eye-read.
The expression “hand carry” has been common in English since at least the 19th century. See http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hand+carry&year_start=1750&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
It also denotes a personal, human response rather than merely submitting the request to the maws of the Kafkaesqe bureaucracies with which we all have to deal.
It is not a bad image actually–similar to hand made. Handcrafted, hand woven, etc.
Matthias, if you saw the portion of the campus he was describing, you would understand. It really does look like a portal.
Matthias and Michael, “hand-carrying” reminds me of the film Office Space where the guy tries to justify his existence to the consultants by telling them that he takes the form from one person to another person.
And MargaretD, if I said that I “carried” a letter to the post office, how would that be distinguishable from saying that I “hand-carried” it to the post office?
Merely the emphasis that there’s an especial urgency or importance to making sure it got there.
Hunter
Chemical Engineers are wonderful people (speaking as a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers)! As to “hand-carry” that was Army usage when I enlisted in 1972 and is current now–I am in an Army National Guard Avaition Brigade, so my I have “first-hand knowledge” and was recently asked to “hand carry this document to Major ___.”
We just have to pull up our pants and live with it!
Neil
I think the embedded idea here is, “you are *not* to send this by post or FedExpress — you will take this over yourself!”
I still can’t understand how the words “carried” and “hand-carried” can be distinguished from each other. I hear the rationale about personal care, but I can’t understand how anyone would misconstrue “I carried it” to mean anything other than that I personally carried something.
I think the point being made is that the redundancy of the term hand carry acts to emphasize the act of carrying the way the word “really” is often used. It shifts the focus from the mere nature of the act to its significance. It implies a more deliberate and conscious nature to the action.
It is obviously more idiomatic than lexical.
The parallel to “handmade” seems germane. After all, if you just “made” something, presumably you used your hands to do it. Yet, handmade implies craftsmanship, care, quality. “Hand-carried” (I, too, have heard it in the Army for decades) has the same personal touch. I could have given a special report to the company clerk, but it meant more to my boss to carry it into the captain’s office and say, “Here, the colonel asked me to convey his request (read: order) that you deal with this ASAP, captain.” That’s one difference between “carry” and “hand-carry.”
The term “hand-carry” is a simple lexical redundancy. Deacon Harmon’s comment suggests it is used to mean “deliver by hand directly to the addressee” – if it’s addressed to the boss, don’t hand it to the secretary, hand it directly to the boss himself. I’d never heard it before reading this post; it’s an interesting phrase.
It’s not, however, analogous to “hand-made,” I don’t think. The word “made” is a general term; if I tell you I “made” a card or a wooden spoon or a quilt, you have no way of knowing if I made these on a computer or a router or a sewing machine, or if I used pen and ink, carpenter’s gouges, or a needle and quilt frame. Thus, “hand-made” carries a distinctive meaning in the phrase itself: I made it “by hand,” not “by machine.”
We do, however, tend to equate “hand” making to a greater level of care and craftsmanship than “machine” making. And that may be where the term “hand-carry” derives – as an analogy to the *connotative* meaning of “hand-made.” “Hand-carry” doesn’t, however, hold that meaning in the words themselves, nor do the words themselves hold any literal meaning different from just “carry”; it’s an idiomatic usage. In fact, that’s why those of us who’ve never before encountered it wondered why it would be anything other than an unnecessary redundancy; we wouldn’t think the same thing of “hand-made,” which has an obvious literal distinction from just “made,” not solely an idiomatic distinction.
Beth: As an English major, and professional editor and writer, I concur in general terms with your distinction as a matter of formal usage. However, most of us do not live our lives in formal circumstances, language is organic, and idiomatic usages exist precisely because they have clear meanings beyond their strictly defined grammatical components. If the colonel says, “Hand-carry this to the captain,” he is not being redundant. He means something quite literally different from “Carry this to the captain.” The first I must do myself, the second I can delegate. True, the colonel could have said, “I want you to take this to the captain yourself, and not send someone else to do it, or give it to anyone else except the captain.” Adding “hand” to “carry” conveys all of that far more efficiently and directly. We have lives outside of dictionaries and grammar handbooks. Or is it just grammar books….?
Deacon Harmon: Nothing I said contradicts this. Believe me, as an English professor who teaches grammar, and as a professional writer and editor myself, I know all about idioms and natural usage. I was merely musing over a new-to-me phrasing and wondering about it linguistically. Surely that’s okay? :)
I’d never heard the term ‘hand-carry’ before now, but it seems to me that a parallel would be “hand-deliver,” i.e., deliver personally rather than by some other conveyance.
You’re right, Rob, and that sounds less dissonant, I think, to those of us unfamiliar with “hand-carry” — “deliver” is a general term, like “made” in the other example, so to qualify it seems less redundant. Thus, however, is the history of language, with idioms abounding . . .
Sorry, Beth, I didn’t mean to be pedantic. Well, any more than I usually am. There was no intent to be critical, and anything you say is certainly “okay” by me.