In honor of the Boston Red Sox' World Series sweep, here's a small linguistic gem from Curt Schilling's blog, for Arnold Zwicky's Verb Phrase Ellipsis collection. This comes from a darker time, back in mid-September when it looked like maybe the Sox would collapse and lose the pennant race to the New York Yankees ("Character test incoming", 9/20/2007):
Ouch. I certainly envisioned the start on Sunday ending in a much different manner than it did, but it didn’t.
That would have been the game on Sept. 16, when Schilling lost 3-4 to Joba Chamberlain and the New York Yankees, after giving up three runs in the eighth inning. But it takes some thought for a Red Sox fan (which I was as a boy, growing up in eastern Connecticut) to decide how to feel about a game that didn't end in a much different manner than it did.
Curt is a total VPE monster -- some less striking examples from later in the same post:
Posted by Mark Liberman at October 29, 2007 09:14 AMFor those second guessing anything, from me being in the game to my throwing a ‘hanging’ fastball, don’t.
I had Jason in a spot to do a bunch of different things to end the AB, and didn’t.
Tip your hat to the Yanks for playing as well as they have too, regardless of how well anyone has done they’ve put themselves into this position by answering the bell when they needed to.