a onceing thing
onceing interests 1
except onceing that 2
at onceing [ ] each in his own place; and in less than two the left 3
at onceing [ ] solutely nothing. It is returned to 4
sources (the leftover 4, of 49)
- OCR cross-column misread, at “On the repeal of the duty on railroad iron,” by W. E. Casey, Civil Engineer, in American Railroad Journal, and General Advertiser, for railroads, canals, steamboats, machinery, and mines. Vol. 18 (Thursday, January 2, 1845) : 10-13
- OCR cross-column misread, at “Death of Sir Walter Scott” (“the eldest son and last surviving child of the author of ‘Waverly’”), in Littell’s Living Age 13:161 (Boston, 12 June 1847) : 498-500 (499)
- OCR misread involving four columns at “Childrens’s Circle of Comfort” page — “Chats with Uncle Charlie” on fire-fighting equipment, and advertisements for “indestructible stuffed toys” including “Columbian ‘Sailor Boy.’” In Comfort 6:3 (published by The Gannett & Morse Concern, Augusta, Maine; January 1894) : 7
aside —
Comfort magazine, running from 1888-1942, was created by William H. Gannet “primarily as a means to advertise his patent medicine, Giant Oxien, a variant of The Moxie Nerve Food.” (wikipedia) - OCR confusion (snippet view only, seemingly irretrievable now), involving advertisement for American Harrow Co., in The Wisconsin Agriculturist Vol. 30 (1906) : 5
aforethoughts, afterthoughts
- This sequence started out otherwise, with the line is there a something thing in the overall all.
It/its compiler rambled through word variations and etymologies, letter transpositions, vowel replacements and deletions, &c., &c., suggesting in their train some thoughts, about things seen once only (might they be called “onceing things”?) and/or among other things — among (prep.) “in, in the midst of,” early 12c., from Old English onmang, in late Old English sometimes amang, a contraction of ongemang “among, during,” from phrase on gemang, literally “in the crowd or company (of),” from on (see a- (1)) + gemengan “to mingle,” from Proto-Germanic *mangjan “to knead together,”...
more at Online Etymology Dictionary
— Does a thing seen once only, amount to a thing? Or is there a need for some rime or repetition, the triggered recollection of some Form?Put these ruminations aside to follow where the onceings (as found via Google Books, pre-1923) led. This post preceded (as a draft, by several weeks) the several onceings that follow it.
- The search for onceing (and its plural form) yielded 49 instances (not counting duplications — different scans of same source). The small corpus becomes the field in which this gleaner moves, trawling back and forth, trusting or hoping that several rounds might yield “something to say” — a something with occasional (local, line by line) significance, in a sort of work-around his declining ability to have or articulate a coherent thought or chain of ideas.
The repetition of the word (nonword in this case, though noting the incidental find of one instance in which “onceing” was used as an actual word) provides an alliterative glue, a dominant key? that, like a “wash” in a drawing, suggests a hacceity, a there, there.
This second set of ruminations plunders from a recent correspondence.