I was reading an article in the Bulletin about some nice young educated people who make well-reasoned porn movies.
The most surprising thing I found was a sentence (boy, am I jaded):
She’s nervous. “There are certain limitations to what I’ll do,” she says. “I’m OK with nudity but not sure how I’d feel about the X-rated stuff.” She is yet to tell Brownfield this.
Is yet to tell? I thought it would be ‘has yet to tell’. I’d never run across the ‘X is yet to do Y’ construction, but when I sprang it on three native Australian speakers (without telling them what I was looking for), they thought it was fine. Could it be a cross-cultural usage thingee?
Off I went to VIEW, a searchable implementation of the Brown corpus. Very handy.
The search “is yet to [verb]” gives 72 instances, and one third of them are something like “the [best/worst] is yet to come.” I do have to admit, “the best has yet to come” does sound a trifle odd.
On the other hand, “has yet to [verb]” gives 515 matches. Looks like American usage favours “has yet” over “is yet”.
Readers Australian and American, what say you? Does either ‘has’ or ‘is’ sound ‘funny’? We could be on the cusp of linguistic discovery, which is very exciting, even more so than the porn article.
1 June 2006 at 10:47 pm
just going on linguistic instinct here but both sound fine to me. The “is yet” seems more comic timing friendly and the “has yet” sounds a bit stiffer and clinical. But from an american ear (no jokes about being deaf) they both sound equally usable.