Marilyn Martin writes with an example of a truncation that had previously escaped my notice:
From THE DAILY BEAST this morning:
Samuel P. Jacobs – Thu Feb 17, 11:37 pm ET
NEW YORK – The superstar GOP senator reveals he suffered sexual abuse in his new memoir.
Samuel P. Jacobs on his new book and the beginning of Brown’s re-election campaign.
That Brown decided to write a memoir which reveals such details from his personal life is unusual. For one, the political memoir as it is currently practiced tends to be a self-serving white paper with sanitized, white-picket fence accounts of the author’s life. The early leaks suggest that this is a very different kind of book, at least in its most attention-grabbing places, one with the potential to humanize a public official.
For one can of course be elliptical, if there is a suitable noun in the preceding context to supply a missing head noun for the determiner one. But there is none in this context, and we have to understand for one as a truncated version of the discourse marker for one thing, which would fit just fine in the passage above.
For one then goes along with other end-truncated constructions and idioms: as far as, no matter, the whole nine, etc., discussed here.
There are undoubtedly other instances out there, but they’re really hard to search for.
February 20, 2011 at 7:03 am |
Marilyn Martin comments in e-mail: “And I, for one, do not welcome that new truncation.”