15 Comments

"You lot are a whole bag of trouble," I yell at a bunch of kids on my lawn.

"Get your whole gang out of my parking lot," I continue.

"I hate you a whole lot," I add, starting to run out of ways to combine "lot," "a," and "whole" in a sentence.

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There are great many more examples like these out there, but for the lot of me I can't think of any.

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Maybe you're not seeing the whole picture, but I wholly lot a a lot lot-lot. A.

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Accurate.

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British English speakers will sometimes use the expression "you lot" to refer to a group of people (akin to, say, "guys" in North America). I have to think that has similar roots to the other usages you note here.

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Yes! Spot-on.

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Ohh, I love this kind of talk. Thank you.

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Thanks, Leslie - me too!

Good chance you'll appreciate some of these: https://goatfury.substack.com/t/etymology

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Ever been in a BIGLOTS store? I have not, and the one in town just closed so I will not, however every time I drove by I imagined a bunch (a lot?) of shipping containers they happened to find with shiny plastic stuff spilling out like a giant rectangular cornucopia

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Oh yes! Big Lots were very common in the South, and I loved bargains as a teenager- that seems to be the time in my mind that sicks out for them, so maybe that's when they hit like a critical mass or something.

Also: this reminds me of selling stuff on eBay, typically in lots. EG, "Huge lot of bronze age Marvel comics" or "Lot of sci-fi books from the 80s". Those sold like hotcakes.

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Oh yeah! I sold a few "lots" in my eBay comic sellathon. It was the move when you had a bunch of lower grade books

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100%; we are peas in the lot sale pod. I also liked to describe the comics as they looked as opposed to trying to grade them properly, figuring simply describing what I saw left little room for interpretation (vs explicitly stating "very good condition" or something like that). It was kind of fun to try to figure the game out, you know?

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It really was, I had a lot of fun with it. I started with two of the big comic book boxes, now I have one. It makes a good foot rest under my desk

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Every now and then, I want to go scour yard sales or flea markets for comic books.

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