Buzz
It isn't because of the captivating influence of Bandycoot Cabbagepatch's name or some impressive grammar of doge, or anything else that might impact your ability to even. No, let's return to the original usage of even. For instance, these sentences sound perfectly fine:
She doesn't even go here. She hasn't ever gone here. She didn't go anywhere.
But these sound off:
*She even goes here. *She has ever gone here. *She went anywhere.
What's the deal with these sentences? Even, along with its companions ever and any, belongs to a class of words called Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). They pair with a sentence that already contains a negative and intensify that negativity, but they simply don't work in positive sentences. You could think of them as the glass-half-empty perspective in grammar.
So, it's pretty clear that I can't even is shorthand for something like I can't even handle this or I can't even think straight right now. And since even is an NPI, there's no way to say I can even handle this or I can even think straight right now, meaning there's no equivalent for I can even.
The same principle applies to simply I can't. It's an abbreviation for something like I can't go on or I can't understand why I like this so much. In theory, I can could exist, but we don't seem to use it in the same way.
But here's where things get intriguing. You see, the incomplete phrases "I can't" and "I can't even" resemble more common complete phrases like "I VERB" and "I can't VERB," such as "I know," "I can't sleep," and so on. What if we just treated can and even as if they were regular verbs?
Well, if that were the case, you could do with can and even the same things you would with any regular verb. For example, you could talk about your ability to can/even, as shown in this delightful set of examples I gathered some time ago:
"I am unable to can." "I cannot even." "I have lost the ability to can." "I have lost the ability to even." "I am out of can." "I have lost all capacity to can." "I truly believe in your ability to can." "It felt like the world had lost the ability to can." "I seem to have temporarily misplaced my ability to can." "My ability to even keeps sending me out-of-office emails." "My ability to can has been compromised. For the rest of my life, I'll need medication to manage my can deficiency."
Transforming one part of speech into another is quite common, especially in English, where we don't have many prefixes or suffixes to indicate whether a word is a noun or a verb. For example, we get a record from to record, or to blog from a blog, which itself originated from a web log. In fact, even can and even originally come from 16th-century reinterpreted Old English forms: verb (can, related to know) and adverb (efne meaning "likewise, just, exactly").
But is it really possible to do everything with the new even and can like you would with a regular verb? Well, perhaps not. There's a large online community that’s comfortable with variations like "ability to can/even" but finds the following examples just a bit too much:
"So emotional…I can’t even. Maybe I’ll even tomorrow." "Successfully regained my ability to even! I’m really good at evening!" "I just finished a meeting, now I can stop evening." "I evened for a while, but then I saw that gif and I couldn't even anymore."
What's the distinction? It seems that using the uninflected to can or to even is a simpler step than progressing to evened (past tense), I'll even (future), or evening (progressive).
So, my best guess is that can and even are currently undergoing some kind of transformation. Right now, people are pushing them into unfamiliar grammatical territories, but they're fully aware that it sounds a little odd, which I’ve referred to as stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.
We might leave it at that. Or, can and even might continue on their journey toward full reanalysis. There are certain things even a linguist's ability to can can't quite explain.
Part of a new series on internet linguistics.
