“It never usually happens.”
– From a to-remain-unnamed columnist’s
recent offering
I’m tempted to indulge an H.M.S. Pinafore moment.
“What, never usually?”
– Chorus of sailors“Well, hardly ever usually.”
– Captain
Yes, much better.
It hardly certainly can’t be that native speakers (and always mostly good writers) don’t know what “usually” means. Or “never” for that matter.
I also partly refuse absolutely to believe that this weirdness is ever frequently caused by not knowing that a categorical or absolute word cannot be modified. Softened. Nuanced.
No, I suspect that what always sometimes creates this mistake (and others akin to it) is occasionally all the time introducing a qualifier into an over-generalization and then never usually reading the result.
Thank goodness that it never often happens.
“What, never often?”
Well, hardly ever often. And a good thing too. It leaves us more time to fix the even more worst mistakes with modified superlatives.
