"matter of some importance" (English expression)

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mcthulhu
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Re: "matter of some importance" (English expression)

Postby mcthulhu » Sun Jan 14, 2018 7:04 pm

A Web search suggests that the phrase is not that old-fashioned and is still in current use (though some instances could be intended to be humorous, e.g. the title "A Cheese of Some Importance"):

https://www.linguee.fr/anglais-francais ... tance.html (there are a fair number of examples here, and I see that one of the French translations has "grande importance")

https://diginomica.com/2017/11/14/tech- ... e-and-ibm/

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5538335 ... importance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Susse ... p_McCarthy has "it is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance," which puts "some importance" lower on the scale of relative emphasis

https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/lZMNTiXe#/0 actually has a scale.

https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/tex ... zynski.htm

Etc.
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Cainntear
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Re: "matter of some importance" (English expression)

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:34 am

mcthulhu wrote:A Web search suggests that the phrase is not that old-fashioned and is still in current use (though some instances could be intended to be humorous, e.g. the title "A Cheese of Some Importance"):

Well, even those examples tend to be pretty formal and extremely dry writing, a lot of which is conventionally anachronistic. "A bug of some importance" is half a century old, the headline about women of some importance is deliberate style, and the Lickert scale on the survey is a very artificial context and is no indication of common usage.

The statement for Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart, 1st Viscount Hewart was from 1924, and he was born in 1870.

A lot of the citations in the first link are to pages from international organisations, so they might be translations, and translations are rarely considered "natural" language.
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