Making words work better
This post explores the links between playful language, onomatopoeia, and the triviality associated with knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. It discusses various still current as well as redundant words that suggest frivolity and highlight the charms of English, through examples from history and different languages, particularly focusing on phonetic enjoyment and literary creativity.
Modern usage follows Shakespeare. In the GloWbE corpus (Global Web-based English), in the meantime is 20 times more frequent than in the meanwhile.
Two poetic "meanwhiles"
And, as I was writing this, the last words of Auden’s Friday’s Child, in memory of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, floated into my head:
The rule seems to be that if a candidate can recite half a dozen policy positions by rote and name some foreign nations and leaders, one shouldn't point out that he sure seems a few whereases shy of an executive order.
The above is a superlative example of the creative potential of the idiom frame ‘a few X short/shy of a Y’, e.g. ‘a few fries short of a Happy Meal’.
As a further historical footnote, it is interesting that the legalistic, ritual use of whereas as a preamble to legal documents led to its being used as a noun, defined as follows in the Urban Dictionary of its day, Grose’s 1796 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: