Talk:about shipping

about shipping
Also about ships, about shipped

about ship is a verbless imperative, not a verb phrase headed by ship. It could be viewed as having a deleted verb like turn [or, more likely, put]. I also don't think these forms are attestable as verbs in this sense. (I could imagine the command "About ships" given by a commander of multiple vessels, though it seems anachronistic.) Collins and RHU show these forms, but I think they were following (lemming-like) MW3, but assuming that the inflected forms are worth presenting, as we do (COPYVIO?). MW3 does not show the inflected forms.

to about ship would be attestable.

We do have about-face, which is not uncommon in the "ed"-form. DCDuring TALK 15:51, 5 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Perhaps this should be at RFV rather than RFD. These seem to have seen at least some use, and they might meet CFI. For example, I found these with just a couple of minutes of searching:
 * 1863 March 24, Edward Redington, transcribed letter to his wife, Wisconsin Historical Society, page 81:
 * So we about shipped and started back (did not the steamboat men swear some then)?
 * 1875, anonymous soldier, The Campaigns of Walker’s Texas Division, Lange, Little & Co., page 151:
 * She “about-shipped,” and returned up the river again.
 * —Caesura(t) 19:45, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Don't let the venue stop you. If we get at least one of the inflected forms attested (3) or show two nearly attested (2), or even get one instance of each of the ones with no cites yet, I'd certainly withdraw the RfD and not quibble about unattested forms. (We certainly don't demand attestation for all the forms shown in inflection tables in languages more heavily inflected than English.) I was mostly skeptical that it was ever used except as a command. Do you think there are more to be found? DCDuring TALK 20:29, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * about shipping is hard to cite, because there are so many online shops with "pages about shipping", and more using it to mean "about to ship", but here's one which I believe is fairly clear:
 * 1841 October 17, Amanda Green, "Life of the Nymphs 11", The Sunday Flash, quoted in The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, page 148
 * This Amanda refused and was about shipping to the other side, when the gentleman sprang out, clasped her in his arms, lifted her in, whistled to his horse and the next moment was flying about like mad [...]
 * I've also got one more about shipped
 * 1858 Fraser's Magazine, edited by James Anthony Froude and John Tulloch, Volume 58, Page 23
 * We are told repeatedly that the King advised, restrained, coerced, conceded; that he alone saw the end from the beginning, and that in his hand only the helm of the State "about-shipped" or stood still at the right moment.
 * Can't find any "about ships" - struggling to think of a context it would be used in. Smurrayinchester (talk) 21:03, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * These metaphorical uses count in my book, as long as we don't try to have two separate senses. Thanks to both of you for finding these. I wasn't having any luck finding cites. I wonder why. DCDuring TALK 23:34, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Funnily enough, it looks like "about ship" as a verb can also be its own simple past form, instead of "about shipped":
 * 1807, A Journal kept at Nootka Sound, John R. Jewitt, page 27
 * The ships fired grape shot but to no effect. They about ship and went to sea.
 * 1859, Ancient dominions of Maine, Rufus King Sewall, page 82
 * They stood for the land, and as they could not fetch in before dark, they about ship, and lay "a hull, all that night," finding abundance of fish, "very large and great" [...]
 * 1863', African hunting from Natal to the Zambesi, including Lake Ngami, the Kalahari Desert &c. from 1852 to 1860, William Charles Baldwin, page 14
 * as the sea and the wind were so dead ahead that they found they could make no way, and the boat was at times half full of water, so they about ship and ran before the wind, much to their delight, living on geese and water melons (capital things on a hot day); spent a very comfortable night before the fires, without any blankets [...]
 * Have cited these and adjusted the inflection template. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:47, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I had the idea that the term might be construed as a verb headed by about. A search for abouting ship and abouted ship finds two instance of abouting ship and one independent usage of abouted ship. Such confusion suggests that the term was not much used this way. DCDuring TALK 12:01, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * There's at least one "abouts ship" too, which seems to support your idea. Do you think it's worth making the inflection line a bit long and unwieldy for the sake of completeness? It's unlikely anyone would ever come across "abouting ship", but its meaning seems awfully opaque to someone not familiar with the phrase. Smurrayinchester (talk) 13:26, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * We should keep the citations in any event. If no inflected form of the headword is attestable, perhaps we should not have an inflection line and note the rare variations in a usage note direct folks to the citations page. Whichever of the two gets at least one form really attested could be awarded the inflection line. When, as and if the other inflection gets attested, we could show both inflections.
 * I don't recollect a case like this. Are there others in which an expression consisting of two non-verbs becomes a verb, for which some usage has each of the non-verbs inflecting as if they were verbs. This makes the mothers-in-law/mother-in-laws alternation look pretty trivial. about face doesn't have this alternation. I suppose that no sense of ship seemed appropriate whereas as face does have an appropriate sense. DCDuring TALK 15:15, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * As it stands, we have three cites for "he about shipped" (assuming "about-ship" and "about ship" are taken to be identical for inflection purposes) and four for "he about ship" (plus more for "they about ship", but it's not always clear whether that's the past or present tense). All the other inflections are below our 3 cite threshold. Taken together, "about ship[s/ed/ing]" has 4 cites, "about[s/ed/ing] ship" also has 4, and "about ship" as a past tense form has 7. (As a side note, there are a handful of "abouts face" as verbs, including one from Poe, but no "abouting face" or "abouted face" except for on blogs and Youtube) Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:16, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * This definitely is a keeper for a linguistic . DCDuring TALK 14:51, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I've added all four of the instances of usage I found (Books [all], Scholar, News archive, Usenet) of about ship with about inflected as a verb to Citations:about ship. They are more recent than the instances inflecting ship, but I draw no conclusions from that. With that, I think we've settled the inflection-line question.
 * Keep. DCDuring TALK 15:31, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Kept by DCDuring. — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 05:52, 20 September 2012 (UTC)