Talk:by and by

Procrastination
Interesting, I personally interpret by and by as "not now, not very soon, possibly not ever". It may be my idiolect but the contemporary usage I've seen (heard?) doesn't contradict it. Some source mentioned it as being used in connection with procrastination. "The road of by and by leads to the town of never" is supposed to be a translation of a Spanish proverb. Another example is "People are likely to sing themselves into perdition with "the sweet by and by." What they need is the sweet now, which is the accepted time and the day of salvation." Even Shakespeare: "By and by is easily said" Hamlet III,2:404. DCDuring TALK 14:59, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * That's true in my idiolect as well. However, I think that any word that modifies a phrase to place it in the indistinct future will suffer from such connotations, because in most languages, the future tense is in fact the distinct future tense. That is, "I will do it" or "I shall do it" makes it seem like the doing will occur in a reasonable timeframe. We do have the future perfect tense to deal with that, but it's underused and probably will have dropped out of most dialects of English by the time we figure out how to use it as a way to note distinctness, like Latin does to a degree. --Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 15:19, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I saw a sociolinguistic work (only one) that referred to "procrastination marker" and "procrastination aspect" in Southeast Asian languages. I don't really think that this is a dictionary-ready meaning, rather than a pragmatic consequence of the lack of specificity to the time frame.
 * Folks occasionally use the future perfect to convey definiteness. "I will have done it by then." But also, "I will do it by then." The burden of specificity is mostly carried by the adverbial. DCDuring TALK 17:07, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a problem, though, when we drop adverbs and adverbial constructions in the interest of conciseness, as so often happens. I must figure out how to work a procrastination marker into my conlang :) --Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:24, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

In my mind the "by and by" was automatically perceived as analogue to the Russian "потихоньку, полегоньку", roughly meaning "by quiet (steps), by light (steps)", with "по" as "by" and "ку" as diminutive suffixes signifying that the eventuality of getting somewhere "by and by" will be long to wait for. (0: --CopperKettle (talk) 06:20, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

in the by and by
In the by-and-by means "in the future" --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:38, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

bye and bye
this spelling appears here. — Soap — 22:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC)