Why do multiple people say MULTIPLE so multiple times

Gentlemen, this is Hop 19. Multiple aircraft, multiple bogeys. Something quite unusual and remarkable has recently happened, indeed is still in the process of happening, to the English language. To explain the unusualness and remarkableness, need to quickly review the difference between content words and function words. Most words are content words. They have most of the meaning and make up the bulk of any dictionary. Nouns like life, world, information. Verbs like sit, include. Adjectives like local, popular. And adverbs like frequently. New content words appear all the time, like internet and online and download. But you could fit all the function words on page or two. Function words are also known as closed class words, precisely because there's small, fixed number of them. Take the class of function words known as determiners or determinative These include the articles, the and demonstratives like this and that, and quantifiers like every and few. Determiners go with nouns: the book, that book, every book. So they're bit like adjectives, but they don't actually tell you what the books are like, the way adjectives do, like big books or boring books. Determiners also have grammatical properties that make them different from adjectives. So singular countable noun like book actually has to have determiner: you can't just say ‘book is precious’, you have to say book is precious, or that book, or every book is precious. We all know English has just two articles, the and But how many quantifiers are there? More than two, obviously, but the set of basic quantifiers is pretty small, except for the numerals like one, two, seventeen, fifty trillion, etc., which of course potentially go on forever. We have all, each, every, few, little, little, some, any, both, several, either, neither, no, enough, much, many… So admitting to this essentially closed set new, basic quantifier, with its own distinctive meaning and grammar, widely used in both casual and formal styles – giving English new determiner – is not an everyday occurrence. And still don't have it. Or rather, didn't have it until my last video. There are multiple American vowel mergers before historic If any of you were wondering why had funny little smile there, it was because it was the first time decided to use English’s new determiner. Multiple American vowel mergers. Now most of my viewers are lot younger than me, and you might be wondering, Geoff, what are you going on about? Multiple has been around forever. Well, the mathematical noun has been around for long while, meaning some result of multiplication. As in 'Why do ATM’s only let me withdraw cash in multiples of $10'. And there are specialist uses of the word like in the stock market where the ‘multiple’ of company gives measure of its value relative to other companies. Or in American football, where you can be ‘multiple on offense’ whatever that means. But as general way of modifying noun, multiple hasn't been common for all that long. The word occurs nowhere in the works of William Shakespeare, nowhere in the works of Jane Austen, nowhere in all of Moby-Dick. The only place it turns up in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe is in single, mathematical footnote. ‘Multiple’ gains traction in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as an adjective usually with specific meaning, roughly ‘multi-parted’, ‘having several components or aspects’. And this is what it means to me. For example, multiple injuries, meaning several injuries sustained by one individual in single incident. Here’s Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms in 1929: Multiple superficial wounds of the left and right thigh. Or multiple copies of single document. Indeed, in this traditional sense, the adjective 'multiple' can often be used with singular noun. So multiple birth produces several babies from single mother. We're all familiar with tests in which each individual question offers multiple choice. visa may allow you multiple entry, single dwelling may be in multiple occupation. There can be multiple homicide, missile can have multiple warhead. And in multiple orgasm, well you get the idea. Of course these expressions are all still around. But more recently, multiple has been liberated from this specific usage to become more general quantifier like several or many. You find it all over YouTube videos, above all in ‘multiple people’ and ‘multiple times’. Multiple people can work on files at the same time Sometimes multiple times Whenever there are multiple people on the trampoline get nervous Put that same person in the same circumstances multiple times Not just someone but multiple people Those dark periods happened multiple times By multiple authors and are translated by multiple people It was intended to be used multiple times And there's multiple people talking In some cases multiple times There was multiple people in that room Every single episode multiple times Multiple people die These banks all failed multiple times Coffee for multiple people Proven multiple times in court You don't want multiple people trying to do this Multiple times To my poor old brain, the appearance of ‘multiple people’ and ‘multiple times’ was quite bizarre. Is Dr Who multiple person? And was Groundhog Day multiple time? When, where and how did this come about? And what exactly does this new quantifier mean? For language nerds, the internet offers incredible resources for diving into the past. Google Ngrams give general impression of how often words and phrases have been used in books over the years, indeed centuries. So here we have multiple injuries. But now look at multiple people. And multiple times. Ngrams will also let you separate out American and British books. Here we have multiple times, and we see the not uncommon phenomenon of something developing in America and then being copied by the Brits, here with delay of about nine years. So quite drastic change happened in the US towards the end of the 20th century. How did this come about? Well we can dig lot deeper with various online searches, and by far the richest mass of data is at English corpora dot org, which lets you search whole range of corpuses or corpora. The data is mostly but not exclusively American, and it's mostly written English but there are also large amounts of speech, scripted and unscripted. It's freemium thing, but if you're student your institution may have licence allowing unlimited searches. Here we can find that the British National Corpus, with 100 million words of spoken and written British English, covering the 1980s to the early 1990s, doesn’t contain single instance of either 'multiple times' or 'multiple people'. By far the most common word following multiple was sclerosis, followed by choice, injuries and copies. And switching to the Movie Corpus of mostly American films, we see that in the 1990s, again and again it’s multiple choice, multiple personality, multiple homicides, multiple injuries, gunshots, stab wounds, fractures. It isn’t until the 2000s that the Movie Corpus has an example of ‘multiple times’. And it isn’t until the 2010s that we get ‘multiple people’. Soap operas were slightly ahead of movies, with ‘multiple people’ appearing on Guiding Light in 2003. The Time Magazine Corpus has 275,000 articles from 1923 to 2006. It doesn’t contain ‘multiple people’ at all, but for ’multiple times’ we can track down patient zero in September 1999. This, apparently, is the very first instance of Time journalist writing ‘multiple times’. The TV Corpus has its first 'multiple times' three years earlier, in 1996. Searching the corpora for earlier examples of multiple, we get glimpses of how the adjective with its specific meaning mutated into quantifier. Here in 1974 is discussion in Congress of how the FBI came to have billions of fingerprints on file. Did you say billions? That’s more people than there are in the United States. Well, there are some there for – there are multiple people there, and there are also people in there who are dead, and there are also aliens in there. assume that's foreigners, not Area 51. Now when the speaker says there are multiple people, he means there are individuals each with multiple fingerprint record. Of course there are many people in the FBI fingerprint database, but he only enlists the word 'multiple' to convey the meaning of several or many records per person. And compare the first instances of ‘multiple times’ in the TV corpus and the Time Magazine corpus. We have ‘was stabbed multiple times’ and ‘shot him multiple times’. So we're talking about multiple shots or injuries inflicted at one time. The novelty is the use of the word multiple not with the shooting or stabbing but with time. And if you can have multiple times, then you can pretty much have multiple anything. Of course the word multiple is also associated with maths, science and technology. This is the earliest use of 'multiple times' that could find by journalist on the BBC website, in 2005, referring to re-writeable discs (DVD-RW) which can be recorded onto multiple times. Here time really is 'multi-parted': one disc, several instances of recording. And let's go back to 1987. Data, you are fully functional aren't you? In every way of course. am programmed in multiple techniques. broad variety of pleasuring. In 1987, think the then very tech-y word 'multiple' had level of incongruity that's now faded. And then there's the fact that technical sounding words can seem quite impressive, even dramatic. feel the need, the need for speed Gentlemen, this is Hop 19. Multiple aircraft, multiple bogeys. Your training is half over. In Top Gun talk, used there in the 1989 movie, hop is an aircraft manoeuvre. But hop 19 is multiple-aircraft, multiple-bogey manoeuvre. It's the traditional sense of the word. But you can see how audiences might hear 'multiple' there as an excitingly technical way of just saying several or many. And multiple people might start using it themselves, multiple times. Now some of you may be thinking that this isn’t change in word class from adjective to determiner, so much as just mistake. Well firstly, there’s no question that for many people multiple has become fully-fledged determiner. The clincher of that is that it appears with partitive. That’s the ‘of’ phrase that you get with quantifiers, for example in many of them, both of you, all of us, some of this, one of the things, much of the time, and so on. You can’t do this with adjectives, like ‘I hate boring of the books’ (the exception of course being comparatives and superlatives like the better of the two). And as said, like other quantifiers, ‘multiple’ is now widely used with the partitive ‘of’. Any one of these actors, or multiple of them Multiple of these qualities Apollo 11 had multiple of these alarms I've already talked to multiple of my female friends Multiple of these acoustic traps Multiple of our resource partners know multiple of them Multiple of those Multiple of these Might want to do multiple of them You see multiple of these today There are multiple of them Multiple of these entanglement networks For long enough to cook multiple of these You can have multiple of these And multiple of them are scattered throughout the galaxy If there's multiple of the same card in the deck There are multiple of these You will need multiple of these if you're going down the cloth pad route So those dictionaries which use the term determiner, like Oxford Learner’s and Cambridge, are bit behind the times when they don't include this in their entries for ‘multiple’. Wiktionary is the only dictionary I’ve found that acknowledges ‘multiple’ can be determiner. And what about this being mistake, or bad thing? have occasionally seen complaints about the use of the pretentious word ‘multiple’ where good old ‘several’ or ‘many’ would have done just fine. But multiple isn’t just pretentious substitute for many or several. It has its own meaning and grammar. Clearly it isn’t the same as many. You can have multiple wisdom teeth extracted but nobody has many wisdom teeth. You can get multiple flat tires in day, but many? Nor is multiple the same as several. ‘Several’ and ‘multiple’ both mean more than one, and usually more than two, but ‘several’ has been referred to as ‘paucal’ because smallness of quantity is built into its meaning. ‘Several’ can only refer to small number of things, whereas multiple can mean many. Things are never described as ‘so several’ or ‘too several’, but we do occasionally get ‘multiple’ used with ‘so’ and ‘too’. There are so multiple reasons why Dershowitz should've been fired. There were so multiple areas to the preschool that each child was able to take turn. And things can be too multiple to list and too multiple to count. The fact is, ‘multiple’ is more exciting, more interesting than ‘several’. ‘Several years ago’ simply locates something in the recent past, but ‘multiple years’ draws your attention to the fact that it’s not just one year. And if something happened multiple times, it wasn’t just repetition, it was significantly, interestingly more than once. Multiple is several on steroids. Combine this significant, interesting connotation with the technical associations of mathematical word, suggesting you might actually have done some research, and you can see why ‘multiple’ is irresistible to YouTubers. Multiple people, multiple times To investigate the status of multiple today, I’ve added to my website new survey, multiple choice naturally, asking for your reactions to various uses of the word. So, after you’ve liked this video and subscribed (if you haven’t already), it would be fantastic if you could click the link in the description below and take part. If you’re still in therapy after completing the last marathon survey, promise this one should take no more than couple of minutes. In advance, multiple thanks.