Dummy "It," Existential "There," and a Slip of the Ear: There's a Name for It (#22)

In our extensive Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you'll find a name for . . .

• the use of it as a subject in sentences about time and weather (for example, "It's raining") and in certain idioms ("It's OK"): dummy it


• the argumentative strategy of calling attention to a point by seeming to disregard it ("I won't even mention her habit of plagiarizing my articles"): praeteritio*


• the conversational strategy of forestalling further discussion by repeating the same expression over and over: the broken-record response


• the use of the expletive there in front of a verb to assert that someone or something exists ("There is a zebra in my garden"): existential there


• mistaking a word for a similar-sounding word: a slip of the ear


• a word (such as "seldom") or an expression (such as "hardly ever") that is almost (but not wholly) negative in meaning: a semi-negative


• a verb aspect that refers to repeated events in the past ("I used to dream about unicorns"): habitual past


• a noun borrowed from another language (such as "nucleus") that has kept its original plural form ("nuclei") rather than adapt the usual English plural ending of -s: foreign plural

* Also see apophasis, paralepsis, and occultatio.

More Words About Words:

• Semantic Transparency, Moses Illusion, and Singular They (#21)
• Sluicing, Diazeugma, and Telicity (#20)
• Bloviation, Bicapitalization, and Invariant Be (#19)

Blackboard: examples of slips of the ear, cited by Norbert Schmitt in Vocabulary in Language Teaching (Cambridge University Press, 2000)