Talk:long-drawn-out

   While i'm don't know why i should be so sure, i have an intense conviction that i learned the expression as a post-WWII Yank child, probably from my mother. I never had reason to even wonder until today, reading p. 175 (2/3 if the way down the page, in the middle of a 'graph but at the start of a line) of October the First Is Too Late, 1966, by Fred Hoyle:

Because these phases were reasonably long drawn out, over three centuries or so, it always seemed as if the disease had been cured.

(It seems to me that our hyphenated form may be desirable when it modifies the following noun, tho i doubt i'd even consider using hyphens (as our entry page does) when it appears after "were" as the end of the clause. Anyway...)
   In fact, i was gob-smacked by Hoyle's usage, bcz i can almost hear my mother pronouncing it as a phrase that could reasonably be transcribed as, say,

... a long, drawn-out [process].

That is to say, not construing "long" as an adverb (of time) as clearly implied in Hoyle's instance (and probably also by wikt's use of hyphens); i never once, before Hoyle spake, considered construing the phrase as differing in meaning or spelling from "long and drawn-out" or even "long and drawn out" (without any hyphen at all). And i was sure enuf, as soon as i saw his example, of this being a peculiarity of my mother's usage that i've begun questioning a sibling about it. But asking more widely, i now find myself doubting that other Yanks differ from the intonation and parsing i've always applied (in the modifying-a-following-noun instances i've solely encountered before today).
   I'm only slightly interested in whether this wikt entry needs to be supplemented by one with a less hyphenated spelling, but i'm fascinated by this as a possible exception to the usual pattern of linguistic mutation: if we Yanks have lost track of the intention that, in a long drawn-out process, it is the drawing out and not the process that is long, "long" has become redundant for us; given that, how is it that we haven't dropped the "long" out of our term "long, drawn-out process"? Can it be surviving bcz the duration of the longer term resembles the long, drawn-out thing, in an analogy to onomatopoeia, where the sound-frequencies and/or the sonic dynamics of a word resemble those of the thing the word refers to?
--Jerzy•t 01:59, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

   Uh, duh, what kept me from contrasting that phrase with one which i don't recall ever hearing, yet sounds right to my ear -- and more directly compelling than my assertions of the grammatical plausibility of my parsing of "l. d-o."? Is anyone's ear jarred by the following passage, or does it sound (however unexpectedly) like a logical and syntactic parallel to "long drawn out"?

There came a whistling noise, growing louder as it was briefly drawn out before faltering, warbling in pitch, and fading back into silence.

(I'm tempted to claim i lifted it directly from H.G. Wells's description of the Martians' death ray!)
--Jerzy•t 06:34, 20 September 2014 (UTC)