Griceian trends in English

Quinion on 'lo and behold' -- NOT vis a vis, Grice,

"Do not be more informative than is required"

Quionion:

"the evidence suggests that it was sometime in the
eighteenth century - people began to put the two words ['lo' and 'behold'] together to make a humorously reinforced form that might be translated as "look
and see"."

"At first this was regarded as too colloquial to be used
in respectable publications, which is why our earliest examples are
from personal letters."

"Thus, there's a letter of 1808
in the published correspondence of Lady Lyttelton, much later to
become lady of the bedchamber to Queen Victoria and governess to
her children."

Lady Lyttleton wrote:

"Lo and behold! M. Deshayes himself appeared".

This is earlier by half a century, though:

"Here was I sat down, full of Love and Respect to write
my dearest Friends a dutiful and loving letter,

when lo, and behold!

I was made happy by the receipt of yours.

[In a letter by Miss N-- to the actor and playwright
Thomas Hull, dated 22 July 1766. It was included in
Select letters Between the Late Duchess of Somerset, Lady
Luxborough, Mr Whistler, ... and Others, which Hull
edited and published in two volumes in 1778.]

"By the 1820s, it had become common."

"It's still so, though we can
only utter it self-consciously as a linguistic relic."

"We can use it
to refer to some notionally surprising event that isn't really so
surprising because it has been predicted."

-- Reanaysis of the original

1766 letter from Miss N.:

"Here was I sat down,
full of Love and Respect to write
my dearest Friends a dutiful and loving letter,
when lo, and behold!
I was made happy by the receipt of yours."

She has the courtesy to add an Oxford comma, though, "lo, and behold".