So rather than searching to find a perfect antonym, make use of all the other beautiful words we have which will get your point across. These matches cast a rather different light on the probable locus of early use of the expression. Although the 1947 instance of the expression cited in my original answer appears in The Billboard, I interpreted it as an attempt at faux hick talk by the reporter. But The Billboard is also the source of four of the eleven matches from 1943–1944, including the earliest one, and none of those instances show any sign of working in an unfamiliar dialect. In addition the four Billboard occurrences, three others come from the world of entertainment, one from advertising, one from military camp talk, one from organized labor, and one from a novel.
I believe the puzzle comes from the common but mistaken belief that prepositions must have noun-phrase object complements. Since for is a preposition and free is an adjective, the reasoning goes, there must be something wrong. The fact is that even the most conservative of dictionaries, grammars, and usage books allow for constructions like although citizens disapprove of the Brigade’s tactics, they yet view them as necessary or it came out from under the bed. That is, they tacitly accept prepositions with non-object complements while claiming that all prepositions must be transitive. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.
Answers
Because this question may lead to opinionated discussion, debate, and answers, it has been closed. You may edit the question if you feel you can improve it so that it requires answers that include facts and citations or a detailed explanation of the proposed solution. “She will call early Saturday morning to check in, and will give me her final answer in the afternoon.” We are satisfied that editors may importune the legislature till the crack of doom, without one particle of effect. There were still black slaves in some states in the mid 1800s, so obviously being free and white was a meaningful part of “I can do what I want and no one can stop me”.
Is the phrase “for free” correct?
While here, Mr. Riddle ascertained that the transfer agencies of other western banks were conducted in some instances free of charge. This demonstrates that “free of” is most comfortable for me when used to indicate that something no longer is beset by an entity that had been pervasively enmeshed in its very existence, as a dictator controls every facet of a people’s lives, as the lumps in mashed potatoes influence every bite of the food. The idiomatic way to say this in American English is “on Saturday afternoon”. There was a time, sadly, when not being free, white, and 21 was a significant legal disability.
On Saturday afternoon or in the Saturday afternoon?
I’m sorry that I haven’t given you one particular word as you requested but I have given some examples by which you can effectively (and nicely) state that something is not free of charge without having to use a statement like ‘The product is not free of charge’. There is nothing wrong with changing your choice of words slightly to convey the same sentiment. If we become too fixated on using a particular phrase it can detract from what we finally say.
- As the Pepper Bill is set up, it contains a proviso that permits the cutting of e.
- Under the present system, Free-holders, House-keepers and Lease-holders are voters, whose property may be as little as $25 or a house 12 feet square.
- It’s not correct to use a reflexive pronoun unless the recipient of the action is the person doing that action.
- There were still black slaves in some states in the mid 1800s, so obviously being free and white was a meaningful part of “I can do what I want and no one can stop me”.
- I believe the puzzle comes from the common but mistaken belief that prepositions must have noun-phrase object complements.
While this is certainly a common usage of reflexive pronouns, this rule would reject such common constructions as, “I had to fix it myself.” The use of “myself” and similar reflexives for emphasis is normal English usage of the word. This particular speaker wanted to place emphasis on the fact that they personally were one of the people you could contact for information.
- Well, Jonathan, how about it NOT being correct simply because many people use it?
- I would only change the use in a situation where clarity and accuracy were truly important, like in a contract.
- That is, they tacitly accept prepositions with non-object complements while claiming that all prepositions must be transitive.
- Otherwise, it is common to use a phrase such as “admission charge applies”, “subject to payment” etc.
- Since for is a preposition and free is an adjective, the reasoning goes, there must be something wrong.
- Please note that the Ngrams, although interesting, are problematic because they include the internet age, during which an enormous amount of garbled and inaccurate prose has appeared; I wish the person who provided those impressive images had used 1995 as the cut-off date.
An advertising agency in Cambridge, Mass., throwing caution to the winds, comes right out and invites businessmen to send for a pamphlet which explains in detail how much money a company can spend for advertising without increasing its tax bill. Employers’ advertising is today being subsidized by the taxpayers, quite a few of whom are, of course, working people. In some of this advertising, propaganda is made for “free enterprise” as narrowly and unacceptably defined by the National Association of Manufacturers. It would be bad enough if industry were spending its own money to try to put spurious ideas in the public mind, but when industry is permitted to do it “for free,” someone in a high place ought to stand up and holler. In recent decades, however, use of “for free” to mean “at no cost” has skyrocketed.
The suffrages of the idle, indolent and ignorant would be as valuable, and in many cases counteract those of industrious, active, and learned. And to-day, “free white and twenty-one,” that slang phrase, is no longer broad enough to include the voters in this country. However, the original example (a naked myself used as an emphatic me) is considered by many (and I personally agree) to be poor style. So I’d generally suggest avoiding it unless you really do need the emphasis for some reason.
Well, Jonathan, how about it NOT being correct simply because many people use it? Big-time performers, or the movie studios to which they are under contract, donate their services. Those who can’t afford to work for free are paid small salaries by USO-Camp Shows, Inc., which also meets personal expenses of the entertainers, from a share of the National War Fund collected annually by voluntary home-front subscriptions to support various wartime relief and welfare activities. Transportation, quarters and rations for the touring troupes are provided by the Army and Navy.
Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun (“his” vs. “her” vs. “their”)?
As I said, I’m not entirely sold on this analysis, because I think most people either use “free of” and “free from” interchangeably—except in the case of “free of charge”—or arbitrarily prefer one or the other form to express the same idea, without having any finer distinctions in mind. If so, my analysis amounts to a rule in search of actual usage—a prescription rather than a description. In any event, the impressive rise of “free of” against “free from” over the past 100 years suggests that the English-speaking world has become more receptive to using “free of” in place of “free from” during that period. All of the preceding examples are from the nineteenth century, when “free of” was far less common than “free from” overall. In each case, the phrase “free of” means “clear of,” “untainted by,” or simply “without.” In contrast, “free from” suggests “liberated from” or “no longer oppressed by.” The farther “free, white, and twenty-one” got from its roots in the Southern U.S. as an encapsulation of the most-favored-citizenship status under law, the less it became about formal rights and responsibilities and the more it became simply a declaration of freedom to do as one pleased.
The choice of prepositions depends upon the temporal context in which you’re speaking. “On ~ afternoon” implies that the afternoon is a single point in time; thus, that temporal context would take the entire afternoon as one of several different afternoons, or in other words, one would use “on” when speaking within the context of an entire week. As the above commentator suggests, one can never say “in the Saturday afternoon” — but i think you already know that. In any event, from the above two examples i think it’s clear that the choice of “in the afternoon” versus “on Saturday afternoon” depends on the temporal frame of reference, and the context in which you’re speaking.
Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t a common, general-purpose word in English to mean “that you have to pay for”, “that incurs a fee”. “Free” in an economic context, is short for “free of charge.” As such, it is correct. All uses of the word ‘for’ in front of the word ‘free’ are just plain wrong. As the Pepper Bill is set up, it contains a proviso that permits the cutting of e.
Its use is acceptable in advertising or speech and its use is understood to mean no monetary cost. I would only change the use in a situation where clarity and accuracy were truly important, like in a contract. Additionally, it sounds ridiculous and makes you seem uneducated, unless you’re talking to another uneducated person, in which case, they talk that way too, so they won’t notice or couldn’t care that your English is compromised. The use of a commodity, such as ‘five dollars’, can be correctly phrased, “for five dollars”.
Thinking that he was an old wanderer from his gray beard, they dined him and as Lem didn’t tip his duke they gave him a buck and two years subscription for the Hog Cholera Monthly for free. Before our hero could locate a hotel he was surrounded by a group of natives, who greeted him royally, offering him free room and board (pitch-’til-you-win style). Suddenly a group of local business men kidnaped him from the crowd and rushed him to the best hotel in town where he was given for free a suite of rooms. After being wined and dined Lem was rushed to the burg’s best club where he learned what it was all about. If (as the sentence implies) the dictator had once ruled them but now no longer did.
Search results for the period 2001–2008 alone yield hundreds of matches in all sorts of edited publications, including books from university presses. There is no denying that, seventy years ago, “for free” was not in widespread use in edited publications—and that it conveyed an informal and perhaps even unsavory tone. Such pasts are not irrelevant when you are trying to pitch your language at a certain level—and in some parts of the English-speaking world, “for free” may still strike many listeners or readers as outlandish. But in the United States the days when using “for free” marked you as a probable resident of Goat’s Whiskers, Kentucky, are long gone.
An example sentence would be really useful to show what you want the opposite of. Any word that can be used and interpreted in so many ways as free needs contextual background if we are to understand what you’re asking for. Reasonable paraphrasings of the word free in this context are for nothing/for no payment. Thus many people will say that for free equates to for for free, so they feel it’s ungrammatical. Your original is also grammatical, but while it is something that occurs frequently in speech, I feel tempted to add in the afternoon (as in the first example above) if the context is formal writing. “She called me yesterday afternoon, and said her mornings are too busy to talk. She’s still not sure what her plans are for Sunday, so she’ll only be able to give me her answer on Saturday afternoon.”
Stack Exchange Network
Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. “In ~ afternoon” suggests that the afternoon is a temporal space in-and-of-itself, wherein anything that happens will happen amongst many other events. In other words, the temporal context for this usage would be if one were speaking of a single day — whether past, present, or future — and of a single afternoon, during which many things might happen. The language in this act regarding “free white male inhabitants of said town” and “of Scott county” was the same in section 4 of the 1847 act; the amended language of 1854 simply added the requirement about paying a poll tax. In fact, the wording “free white male inhabitants over the age of twenty one years” appears multiple times in the 1847 Kentucky statutes.
But unless it refers to the “freedom” to vote, I don’t know what the significance of reaching 21 would have been at the time. If you’re referring to a product, it’s probably more common simply to use a phrase such as “which must be paid for”. Otherwise, it is common to use a phrase such as “admission charge applies”, “subject to payment” etc. However the use of free is widely accepted to mean at no monetary cost.
By the time it began appearing in Hollywood movies of the 1930s, it seems to have become a nonregional catch phrase to indicate a headstrong (and sometimes reckless) belief in one’s autonomy and self-sufficiency. In South Carolina, as in other American States, the legislative power is vested in a general assembly, consisting of a senate and a house of representatives. To be qualified for this office, a person must be a free white man, 21 years of age; must have been an inhabitant of the state three years, and, if he reside in the district for which he is chosen, he must have a freehold clear of debt to the amount of 150 sterling. To be entitled to the privilege of voting for members of the legislative body, a person must be a free white man, 21 years of age, must have been an inhabitant of the state two years, and must have been, for six months preceding the election, possessed of a freehold of 50 acres of land, or a lot in a town. This was usually how it showed up in the Hollywood movies of the 1930’s. It is commonly claimed that reflexive pronouns are only permitted when the subject and object are the same.
“No, this time I’m going to be paid—but good! With room and board included,” answered Arden, and described the new job. In these days of high overhead of running a private business a “free” engineering service probably would be worth just about that much to the city. The old saying, “Nothing comes for free” could never be so readily applied. YOU can vote NO and save your money because you know that free forex strategies you can tell management about the things you want and they will do their best to give these things free. If times get a little better in the future additional benefits will be added—again for free. Because free by itself can function as an adverb in the sense “at no cost,” some critics reject the phrase for free.