across
be across something – locuzione preposizionale
It’s important to be completely across the issue before you sell your home.
As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.
The Shell refueller was completely across the fuelling procedures having done the same to Aer Lingus 707s almost all their life with that company.
È opinione comune che le parole lessicali (o parole piene), cioè sostantivi, verbi e aggettivi acquistino facilmente nuovi significati, e che ciò accada invece raramente alle parole grammaticali (o parole vuote), cioè congiunzioni, preposizioni, pronomi ecc. In realtà anche le parole grammaticali vengono usate regolarmente in modi nuovi, ma queste novità si notano di meno rispetto ai neologismi lessicali.
Prendiamo ad esempio l’uso abbastanza recente della preposizione across per dire aware of, in command of, fully informed about, come negli esempi dati sopra. Ero a conoscenza di questo nuovo significato, ma mi ha fatto un certo effetto sentirlo l’altra sera in TV, mentre guardavo un thriller ambientato nella Birmingham degli anni ’70 (The Game, della BBC). Posso garantire che costumi e set rispecchiano fedelmente l’epoca: avevo vestiti (e pettinatura!) uguali a quelli di una delle protagoniste. Ma, come accade spesso, gli sceneggiatori – che probabilmente allora erano in fasce o non erano neanche nati –hanno infarcito i dialoghi di anacronismi linguistici. A un certo punto, ad esempio, un personaggio dice a un altro: “Oh, Alan is across all that”. A quelle parole mi si sono rizzate le antenne linguistiche, perché nessuno avrebbe usato across in quel modo nei primi anni ’70, così come nessuno avrebbe mai detto: I still have feelings for you per dire ‘I still love you’ o I’m on it per dire ‘I’m dealing with the problem’.
Origini del termine
Non è facile stabilire con certezza a quando risale quest’uso di across. L’espressione non si trova nei dizionari o nei corpora linguistici degli anni ’90 ed è riportata solo in pochissimi dei più aggiornati learners’ dictionaries. Secondo me stiamo parlando del 2000 o giù di lì; io non l’avevo mai sentito fino a qualche anno fa, quando ha cominciato ad apparire abbastanza frequentemente su giornali e TV .
be across something – prepositional phrase
It’s important to be completely across the issue before you sell your home.
As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.
The Shell refueller was completely across the fuelling procedures having done the same to Aer Lingus 707s almost all their life with that company.
There is a conventional view that while “lexical” words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives readily acquire new meanings, “grammar” words (conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and the like) rarely do so. In fact grammar words do regularly acquire new uses, but because the words themselves are quiet and unobtrusive these changes tend to attract little attention, unlike flashier lexical neologisms.
A case in point is a newish use of the preposition across to mean aware of, in command of, fully informed about, as in the examples above. I’ve been aware of this use for some time, but it grabbed my attention again the other day when I was watching a TV thriller set in the 70s and filmed mainly in Birmingham (BBC’s The Game). The costumes and settings are mostly spot on: I had clothes exactly like those worn by one character and, regrettably, her hairstyle too. But, as so often happens, the scriptwriters – who were probably in nappies or not even born at the time they are writing about – slipped up with the language. One of the characters said of another something like: “Oh, Alan is across all that”. My linguistic sensors went to red alert right away, because no-one used across in that way in the early 70s, any more than they confessed to having feelings for someone to mean they were in love with them or said I’m on it to show they were dealing with a problem.
Origin
It’s hard to be sure when across started to be used in this way. The expression is not found dictionaries and corpora from the 1990s and is only recorded in a few of the most up-to-date learners’ and native speaker dictionaries. My guess is that it started to be used around or after 2000; I certainly don’t remember hearing it until a few years ago, when it started to crop up fairly frequently in broadcast and written media.
