On / For: A Question for Language Lovers

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Clarissa

April 22, 2016

A subtitle of an article in the NYTIMES reads,

An immigrant waits on the Supreme Court and hopes.

To me, “waits on the Supreme Court” means that she is either a waitress who serves the justices their meals or that she is a member of the Court and she’s waiting for something while she’s there. Given that the sentence starts with “an immigrant”, it’s probably the former.

Now, here is my question: if it would be so easy to avoid this confusion by using the perfectly appropriate “waits for”, why stick the with the ambiguous “waits on”? To make the immigrant in question sound low-class through the use of this mushrooming “think on, hate on, wait on, etc” obsession?

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24 responses to “On / For: A Question for Language Lovers”

Shakti

April 22, 2016

A regionalism probably slipped in past the copy editors. You’re right, it’s not strictly correct. After all the song is “Wait For It” not “Wait on It”.

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 22, 2016
  
  If it’s regional, then what is its region? I hear it a lot around here but NYTimes is in a very different area.
  
  I think it’s more of a class thing.
  
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Z

April 22, 2016

It’s a regionalism and I am called elitist for saying it should not be considered standard English. But I don’t think it should be.

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 22, 2016
  
  Ah, it’s good to know that I’m not alone.
  
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2. Shakti
  
  April 22, 2016
  
  Copy editing is basically dead. These days, educated people who claim Ph.Ds and masters’ degrees put out work with glaring errors. I see such bad writing on matrimonial profiles from men by saying they have great wonderful jobs that I assign extra points to men who appear to have run their profiles through spell checkers.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    April 22, 2016
    
    I would also lose interest in a fellow who says “off of” or “where it’s at.” I would feel too much like I’m at work with him.
    
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    1. Shakti
      
      April 22, 2016
      
      To me, it just smacks of laziness. Couple that with the attitude of “I have a STEM graduate degree and a penis, therefore I’m smarter than you” and I’m instantly turned off.
      
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      1. xykademiqz
        
        April 22, 2016
        
        I teach those young men who go on to get those graduate degrees in STEM. Many spell atrociously, and you can’t find a comma or a semicolon to save a life. Then they all protest when I correct their spelling (and often grammar) on tests, because “This is not an English class!” I follow up by saying that, simply because they will be college-educated individuals or advanced-degree holders, they should have excellent command of spelling and grammar. They grumble.
        
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        Shakti
        
        April 22, 2016
        
        Interesting, I thought most people were more well balanced in terms of their skills?
        I just can’t imagine women in STEM being that sloppy and unapologetic about it. At any rate, I’m sure it’s more work for you to correct them than to leave it be.
        
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        Stringer Bell
        
        April 22, 2016
        
        I teach a senior design class in engineering. Part of their weekly homeworks involves writing a ‘tech memo’ describing a recent development or any interesting piece of news in their field. Basically, sign up for some newsletter type service, pick some article and write about it in your own words.
        
        In my experience, women are exactly as sloppy as the men. Most of them are native speakers of the language.
        
        “The building was halted during the trial of who to blame for the large mistake.”
        
        “This is a problem that needs to be nipped in the butt.”
        
        There were a few people who’d have consistently awful writing every week, so I met them individually and asked them if they would like to take advantage of all the writing resources we have on campus. Two women, two men. The women just started crying, the men responded with ‘this won’t happen again’ (that’s not what I asked).
        
        But all of them had this reaction in common. All of them said ‘This work doesn’t reflect my true capabilities. This is not who I am. I’m a good writer.”
        
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        Clarissa
        
        April 23, 2016
        
        The “nipped in the butt” one is absolutely the best. Even I don’t have anything better in my collection. 🙂
        
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        xykademiqz
        
        April 22, 2016
        
        But all of them had this reaction in common. All of them said ‘This work doesn’t reflect my true capabilities. This is not who I am. I’m a good writer.”
        
        I hear this from every single one of my beginning grad students who are native speakers after they’ve looked at the bleeding corrected draft of their first paper.
        
        The most recent example is a young woman who did her MS with me. The first draft of her thesis was a steaming pile of $hit, littered with run-on sentences and unrestricted clauses running amok, referring to god knows what. It was a routine occurrence to find the same noun three or more times within the same sentence… The draft was just completely unreadable. When I asked her how her grades had been in high-school and college English, she said she was a good writer and she’d never had any problems. It seems to me no one ever actually gave enough of a damn (or was paid enough) to provide her with any real feedback.
        
        Her first draft was probably among the worst I have seen from native-speaking students, but she was really willing to learn. But when the student has a big head, which is often the case with male grad students, they simply refuse to accept that there is anything wrong with their writing… Or that the nonnative speaker who is their PhD advisor could possibly have anything to teach them about writing in English. I hate having those battles.
        
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cliff arroyo

April 22, 2016

I might be overanalyzing but I think in my dialect there’s a difference.

“Wait on” suggests a longer time and that whatever the person is waiting on should be ready sooner than it is.

It might not be standard but regionalisms often carry fine distinctions of meaning lost in the standard.

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 22, 2016
  
  But again, if it’s a regionalism, what is the name of the region? Because I’m seeing it all over the country.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    April 22, 2016
    
    I think it’s more an informal thing that hasn’t percolated up into the standard yet. I can imagine southerners and midwesterners using it, northerners? I’m not sure.
    
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    1. Shakti
      
      April 22, 2016
      
      There’s a lot of transplanted southerners though.
      
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Evelina Anville

April 22, 2016

I just read up because both sounded right to me. (I’m from the West coast.) And indeed they are both correct. “Waiting on” used in the sense you quoted actually has a long history in the English language– though its not iften used in the Northern United States. Apparently “waiting on”conveys a vague sense if irritation or listlessness. And that jives with how I use it. Here is a good post about the issue. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/06/waiting-on.html

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Ol.

April 22, 2016

“To make the immigrant in question sound low-class through the use of this mushrooming “think on, hate on, wait on, etc” obsession?”

Right on.

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1. fluffymog
  
  April 22, 2016
  
  “think on” is definitely a more intellectual-type construction in English English – a little archaic, the sort of playing with words and borrowing of old forms one might find among a literate group who enjoy using different forms. Like my uni friends. oh, we were so pretentious in our salad days! 🙂
  
  Also found persisting in some dialect, naturally, where ‘on’ is one of those handy words that does a great many jobs, usually elided with it to create the monosyllabic “on’t” – if a parent agrees to “think on’t” you know you have a chance of getting whatever thing it is you’re nagging about.
  
  JaneB, in case wordpress gets confused about my username again
  
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delagar

April 22, 2016

Here in Arkansas, either “wait on” or “wait for” are used. I don’t think there’s a class difference here, and I don’t think there’s a difference in meaning.

“I’m waiting for an answer from the bank.” “I’m waiting on my brother.” Either of these seems perfectly fine to me, and if we swap the verbs, “I’m waiting on an answer from the bank,” and “I’m waiting for my brother,” they’re both still acceptable, and still carry the same sense.

I was raised and educated in the South (New Orleans, and then NW Arkansas), so speakers from the North or Midwest may have a different result.

(OTOH, waitresses and clerks do wait on people. That’s true.)

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TomW

April 22, 2016

I grew up in the south and ‘wait on’ and ‘wait for’ are completely interchangeable as far as I’m concerned. But I have had people be confused by ‘wait on’ since I moved to the upper-Midwest and so I’ve mostly trained myself to say ‘wait for’.

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JaneB

April 22, 2016

In English English it’s just an older form – one would expect to see ‘I’m waiting on His Lordship’ in the sense of waiting FOR him in perfectly good written standard English from the Victorian period or earlier, where the ‘for’ often has more of the sense of ‘in place of’ – “I’m waiting on Joe” would mean “waiting until Joe arrives in order to do this next thing” and “I’m waiting for Joe” might mean something more like “I’m standing in this queue in place of Joe who is sitting down over there/looking for his wallet/too important to wait his turn”.

Whilst today the ‘wait for’ structure serves both uses in most standard contexts, and I’d see it as perfectly ‘correct’ English, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the ‘wait on’ option in a legal or financial context where old forms of usage tend to linger persistently, as here. In that context, I’d see it as more formal, maybe a little stuffy, or signalling something about the HIGHER class of the COURT or the fact that the immigrant here is petitioning, is dependent on the decision of, some formal authority body.

It’s true that the form “I’m waitin’ on Joe” also persists in regional dialects in places, and typically seems a bit old fashioned or rural, but does NOT primarily (to my ‘ear’ anyway) imply low class or impoverished – quaint, sure, but the kind of quaintness likely to be used by the family solicitor as well as the farm labourer, just not by the urbanite.

So maybe the editor was English English and slipped up on their American usage?

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Shakti

April 22, 2016

But all of them had this reaction in common. All of them said ‘This work doesn’t reflect my true capabilities. This is not who I am. I’m a good writer.”
Stringer Bell: Why do people keep saying this, out loud, to your face? Is it a Dunning-Kruger thing? While that first statement might be true, it’s not as if you said, “You are bad writers forever.”

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1. Clarissa
  
  April 23, 2016
  
  People are increasingly seeing a criticism of their skill in some area as a condemnation of them as human beings. It freaks me out every time it happens.
  
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