conuly | Today I came across an unusual-to-me collocation

"Said gave".

As in "He said gave consent for the procedure" or "My professor said gave me an F".

A search for this was productive, if mildly frustrating - there's a lot of other reasons for those words to appear next to each other, but it definitely does seem to appear in the sense I saw more often than you'd expect for a speaker error.

You can see some examples at the following places:

Also, it does not matter if they said gave consent in the past for the same action. Consent is about the here-and-now.

An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients is said give consent (in writing) to do so. (This one is so odd I'm not sure it isn't an error.)

Nebraska's Matt Rhule said gave an update on the status of Dylan Raiola....

My instructor said gave me an F

Dr. David Persse said gave an update on what wastewater showed

Poll #32990

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60

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"Said gave"

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Totally unremarkable
0 (0.0%)

Somewhat interesting
8 (13.3%)

OMGWTF?
52 (86.7%)

Of course, there's always the possibility that these are all just disfluencies, but it doesn't seem likely...?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

deird1

Interesting. Do you think it might be bleeding over from Spanish? You don't have to specify who's doing an action in Spanish, and given the number of Spanish speakers in the US, it seems like a reasonable language to be influenced by.

From:

conuly

Is this a particularly common Spanish phrasing?

From:

deird1

Not certain. My Spanish is still intermediate level. But their verbs make pronouns kinda redundant: it's not "he walked" it's "he [walked-3rd-person-singular]", so you can easily leave out the "he" and still get the same meaning. If a native Spanish speaker were speaking English, they could be tempted to leave out the pronoun in circumstances when it would still be clear who was meant.

From:

conuly

Right. Except I'm not seeing the relevance here?

From:

deird1

Ahh… on second thoughts, I think I’m misinterpreting what they were meaning in your examples.

From:

hudebnik

One might very naturally say "dijo que dio X" without specifically identifying either who did the saying or who did the giving of X. But I think the "que" is pretty much required, so the naive translation to English would be "said that gave X". You would then need a further step, because "that" in English can frequently be omitted, to get "said gave X". Seems like a stretch to me.

From:

jessie_c

It is an abomination unto Nuggan.

From:

conuly

It's hard to ask people about their language usage because reactions like yours cause them to think that anybody asking about what they're saying must really be criticizing them.

From:

jessie_c

Fair point.

From:

archersangel

i know i'm not the smartest person, but i'm not 100% sure what this means.

i think it's kind of like "done did" as in "they done did went to town without me."

From:

librarygeek

I'm accustomed to the usage as only "gave said" for both legalese and medical contexts. "Before surgery, I gave said consent for the procedure". "Said" here means the "specified" consent as given previously in the document. The company "gave said" authorization for the work to be done.

I'm not sure how to give synonyms in your stated cases.

From:

spiralsheep

Hmm, I think you might be on to something, especially if "gave said" was also substituted for "gave the aforementioned [...]".

From:

conuly

That was my first thought, especially as the context was from a lawyer. (Not about legal stuff, but that sorta jargon can spread in a person's speech.)

From:

cereta

That's...weird. I mean, it's not even like "might could," where you can see how they arrived at the construction.

From:

conuly

People mostly arrive at constructions by saying what they've heard around them.

And in this case I do see how it logically would arise - somebody is giving something, but what they're giving is words. If it was just once I would've chalked it up to a mental stutter - they meant to say both words at once, and both words actually came out.

From:

ethelmay

I think most or all are just errors, where they were deciding whether to say "said" or something using "gave" (like "gave an update on" in the last example) and accidentally included both words.

From:

conuly

That is a possibility, definitely.

From:

lilysea

I've never ever heard

"said give" before! o.O

From:

conuly

Right? So it's either an error or it's not, but the next time I see it in the wild I will ask about it ASAP, that's for sure. (I would've asked about it today, but it was in somebody else's email and I thought asking them to ask their interlocuter would not go over well at all.)

From:

hudebnik

I don't think I've ever encountered it before today either. Inquiring minds want to know....

From:

conuly

Keep an eye out!

From:

hudebnik

The closest thing I've encountered before today is "the said X" as short for "the aforesaid X", which in legal English means "the same person X I was already talking about", and the X can often be omitted.

"Also, it does not matter if they said gave consent in the past for the same action. Consent is about the here-and-now."
If "they" were an incorrect autocorrection of "the", then "the said" is the subject of the subordinate clause.

"An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients is said give consent (in writing) to do so."
This feels like "is" must be an incorrect autocorrection of "if", in which case it works like the previous one: "said" acts like a pronoun.

"Nebraska's Matt Rhule said gave an update on the status of Dylan Raiola...."
I could get this to make sense by inserting commas before and after "said".

My instructor said gave me an F
Ditto.

Dr. David Persse said gave an update on what wastewater showed
Ditto.

But all of these incorrect autocorrections and missing appositive commas are an implausible stretch too. I'm stumped.

From:

ethelmay

In the gave consent example, there is a lot of "doesn't matter if they said yes previously" phrasing. It makes sense that when this one was changed to "gave consent" the "said" got left in.
"An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients is said give consent (in writing) to do so." I think this one should be
"An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients isf said ^clients give consent (in writing) to do so."

From:

ethelmay

"My instructor said [the following and] gave me an F" is how I interpret the post title, in which the student posts the instructor's note saying their paper was flagged for possible plagiarism.

From:

pauamma

"said gave" appears to have gone back up to early-19th-century levels after a long period of low use following WW1 but its use appears dominated by British English (whatever Google means by that). Of course, that may be due to sentences where "said" and "gave" are part of separate phrases, such as the procedure as said gave the following results.

From:

conuly

Yeah, well, my initial search was so full of confounding sets like "The man, he said, gave him a dollar" that I wouldn't trust Ngrams at all here.

From:

pauamma

Makes sense.

From:

thewayne

EWWWWW BLECH!

From:

conuly

It's hard to ask people about their language usage because reactions like yours cause them to think that anybody asking about what they're saying must really be criticizing them.

From:

thewayne

If I went into a different region and heard multiple people using it, I could see it. I've never heard such a usage, nor seen it in print or social media. But everyone has different mixes of what they consume and people that they encounter.

From:

shadowkat

I'm sorry, "Said gave" - gives me a headache, similar to an ice cream headache. It just doesn't sound right.

Although, I have admittedly seen : " It doesn't matter if they said 'gave consent' in a previous action..." in legal documents, but then legal documents are known to be headache inducing for that reason.

From:

halfshellvenus

Those sentences only make sense if "Said" is a person (like, Sayid). I mean, I can see "He gave said consent" but not "He said gave consent." Which is is? He gave consent or he said that he consented?

From:

conuly

If those sentences are not errors, and are the intended output, then I can assume they do make sense to the speakers. Presumably "said gave" has some shade of nuance that isn't available with "said" or "gave" alone - perhaps it means "verbally gave"?

There are features of standard English that don't make sense if you break them down logically either. My mother used to routinely go on a rant about how stupid English is because sometimes you say "I had had a cup of coffee already" and how dumb it is that the language forces you to say "had had" or "have had" at times.