"I feel sorry for the poor donkeys."

[hkath]

OK, help me out because it's driving me nuts. The iPod commercial with the shiny lights. WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT MUSIC BEFORE? It's like a channel-identification commercial or something of the like, I'm sure of it. I've heard it many times, and I've *been* hearing it for years. Helllp me, tv-watching canucks

Comments

[talcotts]

I'm the only person (so far) who thinks that it's syntactically sound, and yet I voted you second-to-least level of freak.

Maybe I just think about this stuff too much.

For the record, I think the "from now" is redundant because it is implied without another modifier, but I think that it is still sound. In the same way (at least in the days before green ones were just as common) "The red firetruck" is sound.

Or is it the "in" that you take issue with?

[diaryarena]

Is the problem that people are saying "in (duration) from now" to mean "at the end of (duration)" when the sentence clearly means "at some point between now and the end of (duration)"?

[diaryarena]

Oh, i get it now. I think it's a reasonable phrase that has been co-opted by uncareful speakers.

For example, as you posted this entry you may have thought "In a few hours from now nick will post a comment. In a few hours from then he'll post another." So yeah, it's not a substitute for "In a few hours".

[hkath]

No, but the "in" in both those instances is completely redundant. "A few hours from now, Nick will post a comment. A few hours from then, he will post another."

My teeth are itching :(

[talcotts]

For some reason, and I can't linguistically justify it, the first one doesn't sound right to me.

The phrase seems to follow the same construction as "I'll be there in a minute."

Would you also consider that "in" redundant, or is there a difference that I'm not seeing?

(also, for all I talk about it, why don't I have a time icon)