Does the structure "I have had many a worse days/years/meals" have a specific name?
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6It’s “many a worse day,” not days. – Xanne Mar 29 '22 at 02:14
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1Why would it have a name? There are thousands of things like that. Can you imagine being forced to name them all and to remember them all? – tchrist Mar 29 '22 at 02:24
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There’s no name for that because it’s not a structure. If you use “a”, you can’t use a plural noun here.
It has to be either “many worse days” or “many a worse day”.
The adjective is not an essential element of the construction: “many days” and “many a day” are also grammatical. The latter construction has been called the “big mess construction”; see the linked page and the other questions linked to there for further information.
herisson
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John Lawler mentioned in a comment.
It's a fixed-phrase quantifier many a used with a truncated comparative construction worse (than X). There's no special name for it, no. English grammar is almost all such syntactic puzzle pieces linked together, instead of tenses and numbers in paradigms like Latin.
NVZ
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