From prez234 at JUNO.COM Sun Aug 6 02:00:48 2000 From: prez234 at JUNO.COM (Joseph McCollum) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:00:48 CDT Subject: Vancouver Canucks, New York Yankees, Washington Redskins Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999 20:46:03 PDT "D. Ezra Johnson" writes: >I shouldn't have sounded so skeptical about the "kanaka" story. I was >just hoping someone would contribute some of the evidence for such a >hypothesis. By the way, the dictionary didn't say it came into English through a >French form "canaque". Without that piece of information, I was having >trouble understanding just who in the Pacific Northwest was calling French fur >traders by the Hawaiian word for 'person', and why. If the word comes >through French, as Jim Rader implies, then it's more like the French >fur traders got friendly with the Pacific Islander fur traders, and picked >up the word as slang... > >But does anyone know if "Canaque" has (or ever had) currency in >Canadian French? > Back in elementary school (Pittsburgh area), we learned a folk song about "John Canuck." I want to say that he was a railway worker, but maybe he was a fur trader or something else. Does anyone know the song? Oh -- The History Channel does rerun its "Official Network of Every Millenium" snippets, so maybe they will rerun the "hot dog" one some day. I'll try to have my VCR ready. From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Tue Aug 1 05:57:58 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 00:57:58 -0500 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: The list has seen some discussion of this paragraph, originally in the Chicago Tribune: > 1989 _Chicago Tribune_ 19 July (Nexis) In their > confession to police, the > two youths said they would go "make a run" or "gank > an o.g.," which means > they would drive around until they spotted an > elderly woman, usually at a > bank or shopping center or near a school. Fred Shapiro commented: >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have >>earned him respect (props). Now Larry Horn contributes: > I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The > o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the > object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless > "elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. Citing Smitherman's _Black Talk_ assumes a fact that is not in evidence. The cited material does not specify the "race" of the two youths. FWIW, when I saw "gank an o.g." my immediate translation was "rip off an old girl" . . . "Old girl" would not be remarkable as a generic for an elderly woman in Chicago speech, "white" or "black" or European or African American. "O.g." is less common, but used often enough that it seems transparent to people who understand Chicagoese. Its use implies an attempt to conceal the identity of the referent from chance listeners (and, indeed, from the Old Girl herself). I tried to elicit some kind of reaction to "o.g." from my wife, without using "gank" to avoid one confusing factor. ("Gank" is not part of our normal use vocaublaries.) Her first response was "old geezer", since I hadn't specified gender. Both of us have spent most of our lives in Greater Chicagoland. If the youths actually were "black" Chicagoans, "o.g." might have had a more restricted, specialized meaning which I don't know. I am not well acquainted with the everyday speech of people who might be called "youths". (That goes with my retirement: I don't even see youths in the classroom nowadays.) I raise the possibility out of much better knowledge of the speech of older "black" Chicagoans, which is rich in terms denoting the "race" (and status and gender) of others. A European American woman of the "white" persuasion might be called a "grey lady", particularly if she were elderly. (Originally, that was a play on hospital volunteers called "Grey Ladies".) I have heard "grey lady" rendered as "g.l." at times; the abbreviation seems to have the same aim of concealment as what I have seen of the use of "o.g.". My use of quotation marks around the words "race" and "black" and "white" is deliberate and habitual with me. I do it to emphasize the extreme difficulties I have with the meaning of these fuzzy, slippery labels for perceived social groups. (All I know is that the terms are NOT based on actual biological differences.) -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:38 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:38 EDT Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel Message-ID: CREOLE COFFEE I e-mailed the Historic New Orleans Collection (www.hnoc.org) and asked about their holdings on Food & Drink. Do they have a menu collection--from Antoine's (which may have originated or popularized "Creole Coffee")? Do they have any rare bartending volumes to help on "Manhattan" and "Martini"? I was told I'd be responded by regular mail. From the BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL MAGAZINE, October 1907, pg. 136, col. 2: _Creole Coffee_ Into the blazer of a chafing dish put a lump of sugar for each person present at table, add a tablespoonful of whole cloves, three sticks of cinnamon broken in pieces, and one tablespoonful of candied orange peel (cut in shreds). Over these pour one-fourth a cup of brandy, light the brandy with a match and let it burn, stirring the ingredients occasionally. When the alcohol has burned out, turn in clear, hot breakfast coffee to fill the dish. Stir a few moments, (Pg. 137, col. 1--ed.) then with a silver ladle dip the coffee into cups. Serve with or without cream. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DANISH PASTRY OED has 1935 for "Danish Pastry"--and it cites Webster. Boy, and you thought OED was bad on "biscotti"! From John Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999): _Danish pastry._ (...) Although the pastries may have Danish origins, these flaky buns and rolls are more foten associated with New York Jewish delicatessens and bakeries. With this meaning the word first appeared in print in 1928. From AMERICAN COOKERY (I have the index only), Complete Index June/July 1921-May 1922: Pastry, Danish. Ill. ...516 From THE NATION'S CHEFS, December, 1929, pg. 46, col. 1: _Danish Pastry_ As Demonstrated By Christian Sorensen (Mr. Sorenson kindly posed for these photographs at his place of business, the Terminus Restaurant, Chicago. Photos by J. D. Vehling.) Christian Sorenson is a good baker. WHat's more, he originally comes from Copenhagen, Denmark, where he learned his trade. Putting two and two together, we reasoned that he must know something about (col. 2--ed.) Danish Pastry. We were correct. As we like to go to authentic sources for our information, we went to him to tell us all about Danish Pastry, taking the cameras along. The dough for Danish Pastry is similar in treatment to puff paste. You take a good stiff yeast dough, but take less butter than for puff paste, and roll it in only three times three. Let the dough repose some time between the intervals, then roll it out, as shown in the illustration. Otherwise the treatment is much the same as in the case of ordinary sweet rolls. The first "Danish pastry" citations seem to come after WWI. Some cookbooks: 1907--THE BOOK OF PRICELESS RECIPES by the Hahnemann Hospital (Philadelphia, PA) has "Cheese Pastry," "German Doughnuts," and "German Waffles," but no "Danish Pastry." An extensive "Pastry" heading has: Cheese Cake; Cocoanut Pie; Cream Pies; Custard Pie; Florida Lemon Pie; Lemon Cheese Cake; Hattie's Lemon Custard; Lemon Meringue; Lemon Meringue Pie; Lemon Pie; Linden Hall Seminary Taffy Pies; Maryland Lemon Pies; Superfine Mince Meat; Mince Meat; Mince Pie; Molasses Lemon Pie; Pumpkin Pie; Raisin Pie; Temperance Meat Pie. 1908--LOWNEY'S COOK BOOK by Maria Willett Howard has "Danish Pudding" and "Pastry," but no "Danish Pastry." 1915--THE SOMETHING-DIFFERENT DISH by Marion Harris Neal has everything from "Bubble and Squeak" to "Faggots," but no "Danish Pastry." 1916--MARY JANE'S COOK BOOK has only "Pastry, Turkish cream." 1918--CONSERVATION RECIPES by Mobilized Oranizations of Berkeley, CA, has no "Danish Pastry" in its extensive pastry list. 1918--DESSERTS AND SALADS by Gesine Lemcke has "Denmark Cake," but no "Danish Pastry." 1918(?)--COOK BOOK OF THE JUNIOR BOARD OF THE WOMAN'S HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION (Cleveland, Ohio; founded 1913) has "Zweiback Pastry" and "Sailor Duff" on pg. 111, but no "Danish Pastry." 1925--EVERYBODY'S COOK BOOK by Isabel Ely Lord has "English Pastry" and "French Pastry," but not "Danish Pastry." 1925--THE HOME MAKERS' COOKING SCHOOL COOK BOOK (Chicago, Ill.) by Jessie M. DeBoth has "Pastry: Almond, Plain Rich, Puff, Venison." 1926--CAKES FOR BAKERS (3rd ed., Bakers' Helper Company, Chicago, Ill.) by Paul Richards has "Danish Pastries, 200, 218, 388, 390" and "Danish Pastry Dough...201." It also has "Danish Cream Tarts...204, 391." 1926--EVERY WOMAN'S COOK BOOK by Mrs. Chas. F. Moritz has "Danish Pastries, 469" and "Danish Salad, 262." 1928--THE MODERN COOK BOOK by K. Camille Den Dooven has a large dessert section, but a "French Pastry" heading only. 1928--THE BLUE GINGHAM COOK BOOK by Imogene B. Woolcott has "Danish Apple Cake" and "Danish Sour Pickles." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- VIRGINIA REEL It's a reel mystery. The Virginia Reel was a dance. Was it also a food? From the BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL MAGAZINE, May 1906, pg. 504, col. 1: QUERY 1130.--Miss K. M. E. Clifton: "How are Virginia reels made and baked, and where are the best forms on which they are shaped baked?" _Virginia Reels_ We do not know the articles referred to under the name given above. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:46 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:46 EDT Subject: BSP (ASP, B2B, P2P...) Message-ID: Do these acronyms crop up every single day, without end? Just when you thought Y2K was gone... From the NEW YORK POST, 1 August 2000, pg. 44, col. 1: _Newest 'Net shakeout begins_ _ASPs are the latest online rage that crashes and burns_ By JOSEPH GALLIVAN (...) ASPs, or Application Service Providers, have been the hot new thing in the Internet space over the last three months. An ASP firm typically offers to take care remotely of a company's software needs, such as payroll or inventory. (...) Many companies that reveled in the dot-com moniker in '99 changed to a B2B (Business-to-Business) focus in early 1999, only to switch to calling themselves ASPs when a chill wind ran through the Nasdaq in April. With the flap over Napster, the term P2P (Peer-to-Peer)("P2P" sounds like this Popik's gotta go to me--ed.) has suddenly become hot. Napster users swap filed "peer-to-peer"--between each other directly--without much of a middleman, but nobody's figured out how to make money from P2P yet. (Col. 3--ed.) The supply of three-letter acronyms is not exhausted yet, however. Companies such as ClearCross of New York--which lets companies calculate shipping tariffs and legal bills associated with import-export activities and also lets them use its network of insurance companies, banks, and freight carriers--have found the ASP has bad associations. They've started calling themselves BSPs, Business Solution Providers. BSPs offer customers the chance to outsource pracitcally everything. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:28 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:28 EDT Subject: Mile High City Message-ID: "Denver has always been known as the Mile High City." --Denver Convention & Visitors Bureau web site (www.denver.org/maps/faq.asp) "Mile High City" is not in the OED, which is editing "M." From AMERICAN NICKNAMES, 2nd edition (1955) by George Earlie Shankle, pg. 122: _Denver, Colorado_ Denver is known as the _City of the Plains_, _Convention City_, and _Queen City of the Plains_. No "Mile High City"! THE AMERICAN THESAURUS OF SLANG (1942) by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin van den Bark, entry 46.1: City of the Plains, Convention City, Mile High City, Queen City of the Plains, _Denver, Colorado_ I e-mailed the Colorado Historical Society, with no response. The leading Denver historian appears to be Thomas J. Noel. I couldn't find his e-mail address, but the web's white pages did turn up Thomas J. Noel, 1245 Newport Street, Denver, CO 80220, (303) 355-0211. I haven't called him yet. The Making of America databases did NOT have "Mile High City," but you can recheck me on this. American Memory had: Copyright deposit; Mile High Photo Co.; November 18, 1907. OCLC WorldCat had: MOUNT LOWE: OVER A MILE HIGH: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AT A GLANCE (1904) by the Pacific Electric Railway Company, Los Angeles, CA. FORT DAVIS: ONE MILE HIGH (1911) by the Fort Davis (TX) Commercial Club. THE 105th MERIDIAN IN DENVER AND ITS MILE HIGH LEVEL (1911) by Herbert A. Howe, published by the Colorado Scientific Society, from its PROCEEDINGS, vol. 10. MILE HIGH HYGIENE by Elwood Waite Elder in COLORADO SCHOOL JOURNAL, June 1913. MILE HIGH CLUB (serial of the Mile High Club, description based on 1918). DENVER, THE MILE HIGH CITY (1922? 1989) by the Denver Chamber of Commerce. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 11:17:21 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:17:21 -0400 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. In-Reply-To: <398666E6.540B0DD7@corn.cso.niu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Mike Salovesh wrote: > Fred Shapiro commented: > > >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" > >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have > >>earned him respect (props). This wasn't me who said this. I assume "o.g." stands for "old" followed by some word beginning with a "g", like "girl" or "geezer." Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From fodde at UNICA.IT Tue Aug 1 11:33:03 2000 From: fodde at UNICA.IT (Luisanna Fodde) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:33:03 +0200 Subject: Conference Announcement Message-ID: CAAR (College for African American Research) 2001 Conference will be held in Sardinia Italy, 21-25 March 2001. The topic of the conference is "Crossroutes: the Meanings of Race for the 21st Century". Paper Proposals deadline: Sept. 15th. http://www.hum.ou.dk/projekter/CAAR/conferences/sardinia.htm From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 11:32:35 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:32:35 -0400 Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel In-Reply-To: <37.844aa0a.26b7e706@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > OED has 1935 for "Danish Pastry"--and it cites Webster. Boy, and you > thought OED was bad on "biscotti"! > From John Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999): > > _Danish pastry._ (...) Although the pastries may have Danish origins, these > flaky buns and rolls are more foten associated with New York Jewish > delicatessens and bakeries. With this meaning the word first appeared in > print in 1928. This is interesting. I had assumed Mariani takes his dates from the OED. Did he do his own primary research? Does he give exact citations, or just dates? And can anyone from Merriam-Webster give the earliest citation in their files, the basis for the listing in W2 in 1934 (not 1935)? Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Tue Aug 1 09:41:56 2000 From: jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Joanne M. Despres) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 09:41:56 +0000 Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel Message-ID: The evidence for our (1928) Collegiate date is a trial definition dated 12/21/28. It reads: Danish pastry. n. A rich pastry based on a yeast dough with the fat mixed as in puff paste. I see that a later citation taken from _America's Table_ (1950) by Joseph D. Vehling contains the statement, "In 1917-18 the newspapers and the menus of the nation were full of 'Danish Pastry', due to the activities of a picturesque, hitchiking patriotic baker from Copenhagen who . . . [text ends at this point]." I suppose that's a pretty good lead for somebody who has the time and inclination to read through newpapers of the era. Joanne M. Despres Associate Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St. Springfield, MA 01102 E-mail: jdespres at Merriam-Webster.com From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 14:59:40 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 10:59:40 EDT Subject: EITHER Message-ID: In a message dated 7/31/2000 2:04:01 PM, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM writes: << While I have no evidence to adduce here, I notice that the EI of EITHER is in the prominent word-initial, stressed position. In EIGHT and NEIGHBO(U)R the digraph is immediately followed by GH, which notoriously does strange things to pronunciations; CONCEIVE belongs to the well-known "except after C" subset; and WEIRD, if pronounced as German, would make an unGerman syllable (final /rd/ after a diphthong; does it exist at all?) But EITHER and NEITHER, allowing for the mapping of the fricative edh into the stop /d/, which is so well known that it is included in anybody's parody or representation of a German accent, form perfectly reasonable German (pseudo)words. Note also that they are function words, more common than any of these others except possibly EIGHT, and thus would be much more noticeable in the King's speech and subject to imitation by court toadies. >> This is a lovely caricature of a speculative psycholinguistic argument--thanks , Mark. I enjoyed it a lot. Now we just need to explain why a German reading English would be influenced by "the well-known 'except after C' subset"; why a German reading English would ignore WEIRD because the phonology is marginally non-German but not ignore NEITHER even though the phonology is non-German; why the supposed "strange things" that GH does to the way native speakers of English pronounce words would prevent a German from pronouncing NEIGHBOR or SLEIGH to rhyme with BAY; and why a king (or any other second-language learner) would be more influenced by spelling pronunciations for the MOST common word, i.e., the one that would most likely be learned aurally rather than through reading! From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 15:01:25 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 11:01:25 EDT Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: In a message dated 7/31/2000 3:22:34 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless "elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. larry >> I assumed that o.g. stood for 'old granny' From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 03:28:47 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 11:28:47 +0800 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:01 AM -0400 8/1/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >In a message dated 7/31/2000 3:22:34 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > ><< I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The >o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the >object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless >"elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. > >larry > >> > >I assumed that o.g. stood for 'old granny' for what it's worth, I couldn't decide between 'old girl', 'old granny', or neither of the above. Definitely not 'original gangster', though. Larry From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 16:19:18 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 12:19:18 EDT Subject: Mile High City Message-ID: Though it's not an early citation, Paul Dickson's _Labels for Locals_ has this reference: >>A common commercial adjective in this "Mile-High City" is _mile-High_. There are, according to one report, famous examples like Mile-High Stadium and "enough other Mile-High (or -Hi) shops, parks, schools and churches to fill four columns of the Denver telephone directory" (Washington Post, May 28, 1985).>> - Allan Metcalf From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Tue Aug 1 17:27:29 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:27:29 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: >>>>> My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. <<<<< Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 1 17:55:06 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:55:06 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > >>>>> > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > <<<<< > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) > From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 1 18:34:38 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:34:38 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: Livid is from Latin _lividus_, which means 'bluish; black and blue', as a bruise would be. FWIW, in Latin it had acquired an extended sense, 'envious'. OED (at livid, c.) defines it as "Furiously angry, as if pale with rage". I cannot see where the OED lexicographer who wrote this def got the "pale" idea from at all. The etymology does not suggest it, nor does the use of the term in its literal or extended senses, at least per the examples given in OED. The idea of "pale" in the OED def seems to me to be misleading. In expressions like "livid with rage; livid with fury", the image I have is that of a violently angry person, with eyes bulging and a deep reddish color in the face -- such a deep color that it suggests bluishness. I think that's a reach, but it's metaphor, after all, and color terms are known to be esp. prone to extension and looseness of signification. Frank Abate ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > >>>>> > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > <<<<< > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) > From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 18:59:40 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:59:40 EDT Subject: History of English (Not!) Message-ID: You never know what you can find on the Web. Here's the history of English as one person sees it. Disclaimer: So as not to confuse anyone, I will declare that this isn't the history I'd recommend. >>Most of the words in the English language were made up by the Benedictines and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words these linguists invented. The monks did the word construction mostly by writing a short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases they used wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. << http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/english.htm - Allan Metcalf From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 1 19:07:53 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 15:07:53 -0400 Subject: History of English (Not!) In-Reply-To: <67.7a500bb.26b8781c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 AAllan at AOL.COM wrote: [reporting on what was seen on the web] > >>Most of the words in the English language were made up by the Benedictines > and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words these > linguists invented. The monks did the word construction mostly by writing a > short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases they used > wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. << This came to my attention in 1993, where it was much discussed in the lounge at school. This person has spent much of his life working on this. At one point, he was even tying Greenlandic Eskimo into this. Without looking at the website, you cannot even believe how utterly in-depth this guy goes. It's truly boggling. And he's been doing it for years. From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 1 21:04:23 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:04:23 -0700 Subject: History of English (Not!) In-Reply-To: <67.7a500bb.26b8781c@aol.com> Message-ID: > >>> Most of the words in the English language were made up by the >>> Benedictines > and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words > these linguists invented. Wow--I didn't know that! So how come linguists today get so little respect? Nobody ever pays any attention to the words THEY invent. The monks did the word construction mostly by > writing a short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases > they used wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. Why of course--like "basquing in the sun"! It seems so obvious once you think about it! :) (I hasten to add.) **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Tue Aug 1 22:56:23 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 18:56:23 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: >I specifically remember looking up livid in two dictionaries in the late 40s--early 50s because a friend said it was grey-white. Both dictionaries at that time confirmed her definition. Bob > > In expressions like "livid with rage; livid with fury", the image I have is > that of a violently angry person, with eyes bulging and a deep reddish color > in the face -- such a deep color that it suggests bluishness. I think > that's a reach, but it's metaphor, after all, and color terms are known to > be esp. prone to extension and looseness of signification. > > Frank Abate > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM > Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > > > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > > > >>>>> > > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > > <<<<< > > > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something > like > > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a > further > > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > > (speaking for myself) > > From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 23:05:47 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 19:05:47 EDT Subject: Fwd: cocktail Message-ID: >From the Virginia Historical Society--Barry Popik -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Reference" Subject: cocktail Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 12:46:18 -0400 Size: 1638 URL: From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 23:29:01 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 19:29:01 EDT Subject: livid Message-ID: > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: ... How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face In my experience, the color that white-people turn when they are angry may be either deep white or red, depending on things like blood pressure and heredity. "White with rage" strikes me as being as experientially correct as "ruddy with rage." And then there is the idiom "blue in the face," which may have some connection to reality! I suspect that our perception of reality is in this case based an example of "the metaphors we live by" (Lakoff & Johnson's horrible old book is nonetheless a good shorthand for the point I am trying to make here). From editor at VERBATIMMAG.COM Tue Aug 1 23:11:25 2000 From: editor at VERBATIMMAG.COM (Erin McKean) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 18:11:25 -0500 Subject: parce que c'est le fete de Bastille In-Reply-To: <000701bfed60$74ed1100$b7ec43c0@pavilion> Message-ID: Some more old-newsitude . . . Thomas Paikeday's dictionary has "Man the barricades, citizen!" as an example sentence at "barricade." I don't think a dictionary for native speakers would put this in as it is (to me, at least) transparent. A learner's dictionary might, if "barricade" made the cut. Haven't checked that. . . And to commingle threads disgracefully, the only interpretation of "o.g." I had was "original gangsta." (I listen to much too much bad rap music.) Erin McKean editor at verbatimmag.com >Why won't a single dictionary editor admit this expression into his book? > >barricades; to (at, on) the >barricades; man (woman) the > >Have collected and submitted more than a dozen examples of this idiom from >respected periodicals, by well-regarded authors, over a period of the last >ten years, attesting to its general acceptance, but nobody wants to print >it. > >DEF = (to join) the revolution; to be a revolutionary; to prepare to do >battle for the Cause (any cause); to be where the new action is (as in 1789) > >Aux armes, citoyens! > >Bernie Kane >word-finder From storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM Wed Aug 2 00:49:16 2000 From: storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM (storkrn) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 17:49:16 -0700 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: This is in wide circulation on the net with no attribution or other identifying data. Subject: VERY interesting > Life in the 1500s: > > Most people got married in June because they took > their yearly bath in May and were still smelling pretty good by > June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried > a bouquet of flowers to hide the b.o. > Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house > had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and > men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. > By then the water was so dirty you could actually loose someone in it. > Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water." > > Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood > underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the > pets ... dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs lived > in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the > animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, "It's > raining > cats and dogs." > > There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This > posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings > could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they found if they made > beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, it addressed that > problem. Hence those beautiful big 4 poster beds with canopies. > > The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, > hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors which would > get slippery in the winter when wet. So they spread thresh on the floor > to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding > more thresh until when you opened the door, it would all start > slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at the entry way, > hence a "thresh hold." > > They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over > the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They > mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. They would eat the > stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and > then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that > had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: peas porridge hot, > peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. > > Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel really special > when that happened. When company came over, they would > bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of > wealth and that a man "could really bring home the bacon." They > would cut off a little to sharewith guests and would all sit around > and "chew the fat." > > Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid > content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food. This happened > most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating tomatoes ... for 400 > years. > > Most people didn't have pewter plates, but had trenchers- a piece of > wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Trencher were never washed > > and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After eating off wormy > trenchers, they would get "trench mouth." > > Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom > of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the > "upper crust." > > Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would > sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along > the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were > > laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would > gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. > Hence the custom of holding a "wake." > > England is old and small and they started running out of places to > bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones > to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these coffins, one out of > 25 > coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they > realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would > tie astring on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through > > the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the > graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence on the "graveyard > shift" they would know that someone was "saved by the bell" > or he was a "dead ringer." > From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Wed Aug 2 10:07:33 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 05:07:33 -0500 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: I made the mistake of saying: > > Fred Shapiro commented: > > > > >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" > > >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have > > >>earned him respect (props). Fred Shapiro quite properly chided me, thusly: > This wasn't me who said this. I assume "o.g." stands for "old" followed > by some word beginning with a "g", like "girl" or "geezer." Ooops -- my bad. Sorry! I couldn't be more embarassed -- I've always insisted that when my students find it useful to quote, they had damned well better go back to the original source and get the words and the attribution straight! -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Wed Aug 2 14:29:02 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:29:02 -0400 Subject: livid Message-ID: Another term I've heard for "blind anger" is frosted, as in "That really frosts my ass." I've always interpreted this to been gone cold--white/bluish grey--with anger, which would be past the red stage. Any link, you think? RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > ... How often has anyone here actually seen a > > > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > > > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > > > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face > > In my experience, the color that white-people turn when they are angry may be > either deep white or red, depending on things like blood pressure and > heredity. "White with rage" strikes me as being as experientially correct as > "ruddy with rage." And then there is the idiom "blue in the face," which may > have some connection to reality! > > I suspect that our perception of reality is in this case based an example of > "the metaphors we live by" (Lakoff & Johnson's horrible old book is > nonetheless a good shorthand for the point I am trying to make here). From sagehen at SLIC.COM Wed Aug 2 14:36:30 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:36:30 -0400 Subject: Ron Butters' 8/1 "livid" post Message-ID: Like Fred Shapiro, I, too, was misquoted here, but these machines make it all too easy to get the fibers of these threads tangled. Ron makes a good point: that the expression of rage may be red, white or blue, depending on the individual's physiology. I didn't mean by my original suggestion that the reader unfamiliar with /livid/ would actually think it meant /vivid/, only that /vivid/ and, perhaps, /lively/ would lend it a sort of aura --a brightness-- that would stick in the mind. More LED-ness than LCD-ness, so to speak. A.Murie From jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM Wed Aug 2 14:30:40 2000 From: jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM (Lyons, Jennifer M) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:30:40 -0400 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse Message-ID: A (non-linguist) coworker of mine is curious about the origins of the phrase "flipping the bird". I couldn't find anything in my copy of the Random House HDAS, but I only looked quickly. Any answers? Also, recently, my mother and I had a little "argument" over how to pronounce the word "Morse", as in Morse Code. She said it was pronounced like "morris", while I say it rhymes with "horse". (Sorry, I don't know how to do the IPA in email....) This morning, the radio traffic reporter said "morris", too. Any observations on this? Thanks, Jen From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 2 03:32:25 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 11:32:25 +0800 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:30 AM -0400 8/2/00, Lyons, Jennifer M wrote: >...Also, recently, my mother and I had a little "argument" over how to >pronounce the word "Morse", as in Morse Code. She said it was pronounced >like "morris", while I say it rhymes with "horse". (Sorry, I don't know how >to do the IPA in email....) This morning, the radio traffic reporter said >"morris", too. Any observations on this? > For what it's worth, everyone here at Yale, Samuel F. B. Morse's alma mater, pronounces it to rhyme with "horse" (not with "Horace"). There are Morse fellows here and a Morse (residential) College, in honor of Samuel and of the funds bequeathed by Susan, an heir (daughter? granddaughter?) of his. I don't know how he pronounced it himself, though. Larry From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 16:06:51 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:06:51 -0400 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse In-Reply-To: from "Lyons, Jennifer M" at Aug 02, 2000 10:30:40 AM Message-ID: > > A (non-linguist) coworker of mine is curious about the origins of the phrase > "flipping the bird". I couldn't find anything in my copy of the Random > House HDAS, but I only looked quickly. Any answers? This term is covered in detail in HDAS s.v. _bird_ n. III.9. The sense referring to "the finger" and often (though by no means exclusively) used with _flip_ is subdefinition d, first cited in 1966. Jesse Sheidlower Oxford English Dictionary From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 2 16:17:44 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 09:17:44 -0700 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse Message-ID: re "Morse" pronounced the same as "Morris" (as jen lyons reports her mother doing)... jen, where did your mother grow up? i ask because one of the linguistic surprises of columbus, ohio, when i moved there in 1969, was this very pronunciation for Morse Road (a major east-west road on what was then the far north side of town). pretty much everyone who'd grown up in columbus had this pronunciation. just for this one item - not for "horse" or "force" or "course" etc. i'm not even sure that the "Morris" pronunciation extended to "Morse code". extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. so perhaps Morris-Morse originated with a family who (for whatever reasons) used this pronunciation themselves. others in the area would then connect the pronunciation (which they'd learn first) with the spelling; everybody knows that spelling, especially of names, is funny. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), whose names are spelled "just the way they sound" (that is, with default sound-spelling associations), not that that helps much From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Wed Aug 2 16:40:44 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 09:40:44 -0700 Subject: Campbell (was: Flipping the bird? and Morse) In-Reply-To: <200008021617.JAA28102@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: My mother, who was born in Houston and grew up there and in Olkahoma City, always pronounced "Campbell" as "camel," and once instructed me that this was how the name is pronounced. My reaction was the same as Arnold's. Peter Mc. --On Wed, Aug 2, 2000 9:17 AM -0700 Arnold Zwicky wrote: > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > always struck me as perverse. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Wed Aug 2 16:46:17 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:46:17 -0400 Subject: End of my era Message-ID: This is the ad I just placed in several our local newspapers and such. Part-time research assistant strong on grammar and usage for weekly column on language. Send resume and cover letter to Ann Wort at "On Language", 1627 "Eye" Street, NW, Suite 700. Washington, DC 20006 or fax to 202-862-0409. If any of you know of a recent college grad, grad student, or retiree in the area who would be interested in taking my place, please give them the above information. I will be staying on until the 25th of August so you will probably be hearing from me again, but just in case, thanks for all the help and advice over the past few years. I've learned a lot. In gratitude, Katy Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM Wed Aug 2 16:36:22 2000 From: jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM (Lyons, Jennifer M) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:36:22 -0400 Subject: Morse Message-ID: Strange. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and so did my mom. I just moved to Columbus about a year ago, and I hadn't heard the "Morris" ponunciation until this morning (the WOSU traffic guy used it when talking about the road you mentioned). I'll have to poll my locally-raised coworkers. Why I never noticed that my mom pronounces it "Morris" and I don't, I'll never know. (I figured it out when she started calling that road "more-see" road and I tried to correct her pronunciation. She said, "Oh, so it's Morris Road". I replied, "No, Morse, like in Morse code" - and she said "That's Morris code!") Jen > -----Original Message----- > From: Arnold Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU] > i ask because one of the linguistic surprises of columbus, ohio, when > i moved there in 1969, was this very pronunciation for Morse Road (a > major east-west road on what was then the far north side of town). > pretty much everyone who'd grown up in columbus had this > pronunciation. just for this one item - not for "horse" or "force" or > "course" etc. i'm not even sure that the "Morris" pronunciation > extended to "Morse code". From sagehen at SLIC.COM Wed Aug 2 17:07:13 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 13:07:13 -0400 Subject: Campbell Message-ID: In eastern Nebraska in the 30's, Campbell was sounded more like /camel/ than /ramble/, and when the kids sang "The Campbells are Coming" you'd have been hard put to it to hear a B. On the other hand, up here in the northernmost part of northern NY, all the friends, neighbors & relatives of a local Campbell family say "camp bell": two distinct, equally-accented syllables with the P and B clearly sounded. I'm not sure if they pronounce the soup the same way. A.Murie From davemarc at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 19:02:21 2000 From: davemarc at PANIX.COM (davemarc) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:02:21 -0400 Subject: Campbell Message-ID: I imagine the "camel" pronunciation could lead to misunderstandings vis-a-vis Campbell's Soup--as in "I'd like some Campbell's Soup..." and "That's what Campbell's Soups are--Mm, mm, good." Q: What goes great with Campbell's Soup? A: Humplings. d. From jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Wed Aug 2 16:10:03 2000 From: jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Joanne M. Despres) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:10:03 +0000 Subject: livid Message-ID: I'm not familiar with any further linguistic examples of the association between whiteness/coldness and anger, but it would be interesting to find out what (if anything) medieval and Renaissance psychophysiology would have to say about it. I've looked through the "pale" entries in a Chaucer concordance and found no connection between pallor and anger, though there's more than one mention of paleness in connection with illness, weakness, or fear. A similar search in a Shakespeare concordance indicates that the Bard most often associated whiteness of face with the same physical/emotional conditions Chaucer did, but also occasionally with envy or anger ("The moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air" Midsummer Night's Dream ii.1.104; "On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale, Killng their fruit with frowns" Henry V, i.2.203; "This pale and angry rose . . . Will I for ever and my faction wear" 1 Henry IV ii.1.107; "Your eyes do menace me: why look you pale? Who sent you?" Richard III, i.4.175). The OED offers this quotation: "Choleric men are of a pale or yellowish color." 1634 T. Johnson Parey's Chirurg. i. vi. 10. On the other hand, the following two quotations suggest an association of choler with hotness and redness: " In Aries, the colerik hoote signe." c1386 Chaucer Sqrs. T. 43; "The common opinion is, that all hot, and choleric Grounds, are red or brown." 1675 Evelyn Terra (1729) 7. These associations are admittedly pretty remote from contemporary ones, but who knows -- they might hint at a tradition of some sort. Joanne M. Despres Associate Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St. Springfield, MA 01102 E-mail: jdespres at Merriam-Webster.com From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 20:05:25 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:05:25 -0400 Subject: "El Olones" Message-ID: A friend has been researching his ancestry, which is part Cuban, and has traced it back to a man alleged to have been the bastard son of a pirate. The pirate was known only as "El Olones." Does anyone know what this means? The friend has been unable to find out. I apologize if this is an extremely basic question; it's not in my Spanish dictionary and I assume that the friend has done at least some work to find out. Thanks, Jesse Sheidlower OED From Allynherna at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 01:06:21 2000 From: Allynherna at AOL.COM (Allynherna at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 21:06:21 EDT Subject: "El Olones" Message-ID: Dear Jesse: I just looked in all my Spanish dictionaries, including the Diccionario de Cubanismos Mas Usuales and found nothing! Does the Olones have an accent mark over the "e"? If you mumble "El Olones", it almost sounds like "El holandes", which would translate as "the Dutchman". (Were there Dutch pirates?...) Anyway, this is probably WAY off, but it was interesting to do the search. Allyn Partin From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 02:07:48 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:07:48 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000731152333.0093c440@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Kathleen Miller wrote: > He has me looking into the word livid and how it went from pale-bluish to > enraged. The OED suggests "as if pale with rage." > > Merriam-Webster offers that livid can also mean reddish. I would more readily > associate anger with "reddish" than "pale". > > Which one is it - or is it something else entirely? The OED has this one right. Although "livid" has a number of different color meanings, the meaning of "pallid" is the one that gave rise to the sense of "enraged." Charles Darwin explained it in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: "The action of the heart is sometimes so much impeded by great rage, that the countenance becomes pallid or livid." Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 02:51:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:51:59 EDT Subject: Opera Creams (1938) Message-ID: From THE CANDY BOOK (Culinary Arts Press, P.O. Box 915, Reading, PA, 1938), compiled and edited by S. Claire Sondheim (Sondheim on Opera Creams! There's a place for us! Send in the clowns! So that's what Sweeney Todd served for dessert!--ed.), pg. 48, col. 1: _Opera Creams_ 3 cups sugar 1/2 cup cream 1/2 cup milk 1 tablespoon glucose 2 teaspoons vanilla extract Confectioners' sugar Place the sugar, cream, milk and glucose in a saucepan; bring slowly to boiling point, stirring constantly. Then cook, stirring constantly, to 240 degrees, or to the soft-ball stage. Let stand for 1 minute, then pour gently into a wet platter. When cool, heat with a wooden spoon until thick. Cover, let stand for about 1 hour, then add the vanilla extract. Knead until creamy, using confectioners' sugar to prevent sticking. Cover, let stand for about 3 hours, then roll out and cut into squares. Allow to harden on waxed paper for 24 hours. This is from the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, June 1907, pg. 80: Goelitz Confectionery Company, Cincinnati, Ohio (advertisement--ed.) Butter Sweet Opera Tip, Chocolate flavor Butter Sweet Assorted Opera Tip I have no idea if "Opera Tip" is the same as "Opera Cream." I haven't yet checked through 1,000 cookbooks I have here because I'm tired. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 02:52:07 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:52:07 EDT Subject: Peanut Butter; Tallahassee Hush Puppies; Pop Doodles Message-ID: PEANUT BUTTER (continued) As everyone surely knows, "peanut butter" was invented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 May 1899, pg. 33, col. 3: _HOW PEANUT BUTTER IS MADE._ A new factory has just been put into operation in Kokomo, Ind., for the manufacture of butter from peanuts. For a year or more, Lane Brothers, of that city, have been working on a process of making butter from the peanut to compete with the product of the farm cow, and have succeeded in producing the desired article. At the present price of the nuts the butter can be sold at 15 cents per pound. The process of manufacture is no secret. The nuts, after the hulls are removed, are carefully handpicked and faulty kernels removed. They are then roasted in a large rotary oven. Again they are gone over by hand for the removal of scorched grains. The nuts are then put through a mill and ground as fine as the finest flour, the natural oil in the grains giving it the appearance and consistency of putty as it leaves the mill, except that it is more of an orange color. By the addition of filtrated water, to reduce it to a more pliable state, the butter is complete; no other ingredient, not even salt, being used. It never grows rancid, and keeps in any climate. It is put up in one, two, five, ten, twenty-five and one hundred pound tin cans and sealed. The new butter is already in great demand at sanitariums and health resorts. It is used for all purposes ordinary butter is used, including shortening and frying. Physicians pronounce it more healthful than cow butter, and it is much less expensive. By the addition of more water a delicious cream is made, adn, if desired, it can in the same way be reduced to the consistency of milk. The new butter factory is located but a few rods from a large dairy barn and is running in opposition to it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- TALLAHASSEE HUSH PUPPIES (continued) Here's another Florida "hush puppy" hit--with "Tallahassee" attached to the name of the dish. From THE SOUTHERN COOK BOOK OF FINE OLD RECIPES (Culinary Arts Press, P.O. Box 915, Reading, PA, 1939), pg. 30, col. 1: _Tallahassee Hush Puppies_ Embodied in the title of this recipe is a most interesting story. Years ago (in some sections it is still the custom) the negroes of Tallahassee, Florida, that quaint southern capital, would congregate on warm fall evenings for cane grindings. Some of them would feed the sugar cane to a one-mule treadmill while others poured the juice into a large kettle where it was boiled to sugar. After their work was completed, they would gather around an open fire, over which was suspended an iron pot in which fish and corn pones were cooked in fat. The negroes were said to have a certain way of making these corn pones which were unusually delicious and appetizing. While the food was sizzling in the pot, the darkies would engage in rather weird conversations, spellbinding each other with "tall" stories of panther and bear hunts. On the outer edge of the circle of light reflected by the fire would sit their hounds, their ears pricked for strange sounds and their noses raised to catch a whiff of the savory odor of the frying fish and the pones. If the talking ceased for a moment, a low whine of hunger from the dogs would attract the attention of the men, and subconsciously a hand would reach for some of the corn pone which had been placed on a slab of bark to cool. The donor would break off a piece of the pone and toss it to a hungry dog, with the abstract murmur, "Hush, puppy!" The effect of this gesture on the hounds was always instantaneous and the negroes attributed the result to the remarkable flavor of what eventually became known as "The Tallahassee Hush Puppy." 2 cups corn meal 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups sweet milk 1/2 cup water 1 large onion, chopped fine Sift the dry ingredients together and add the milk and water. Stir in the chopped onion. Add more meal or milk as may be necessary to form a soft but workable dough. With the hands, mold pieces of the dough into pones (oblong cakes, about 5 inches long and 3 inches wide, and about 3/4 of an inch thick). Fry in deep hot fat or oil until well browned. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- POP DOODLES (continued) These appear to be "Snickerdoodles" under yet another name. From COOK BOOK (Issued by the Women of the WETHERSFIELD CONGREGATION CHURCH, 1930)(State?--ed.), pg. 55(?): _POP DOODLES_ 2 tsp. baking powder 1 tblsp. butter 2 cups flour 1 cup granulated sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 egg Bake in shallow tin, sprinkle a little granulated sugar and cinnamon on top just before baking. When served cut into squares. Mrs. Edward Deming From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 03:03:40 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:03:40 EDT Subject: Banana Split; Ice Cream Soda; Hot Soda; Rocky Road Message-ID: BANANA SPLIT (continued) OED has 1920 for "banana split." This is from CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "The Twenty-Five Best Selling Cold Soda Drinks," July 1907, pg. 102, col. 1: BANANA SPLITS Good fancy drinks make good leaders at the soda fountain and besides welling well are an advertisment for your whole soda business. Peel and split a banana, lay both halves together on the bottom of a large saucer. On the top of the banana put a cone-shaped measure of ice cream and over this pour a little crushed pineapple, a few powdered nuts, a spoonful of whipped cream. Top with a cherry. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ICE CREAM SODA The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, November 1906, pg. 94 advertisement, has "Fred Sanders of Detroit" endorsing a product. It states: "Mr. Sanders is well known as the 'Originator of Ice Cream Soda.'" Well known? I hadn't heard. The Cornell MOA database has HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (see "hot soda" in column two), August 1872, pg. 344, col. 1: Soda-water with cream sirups when well iced as above has been fanicfully named "ice-cream soda." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HOT SODA The term "hot soda" was used a lot in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, pg. 85, col. 1: _Hot Soda_ "Hot Soda" is not, as the name might seem to imply, hot soda water, but simply hot coffee, bouillon, lemonade, etc., served at the soda counter. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM (continued); CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM "I love Rocky Road." --Weird Al Yankovic Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK also has a 1938 citation, but from a different source. The date is handwritten on this pamphlet. From HOW TO MAKE RENNET-CUSTARDS AND ICE CREAM, "The 'Junket' Folks," Hansen's Laboratory, Inc., Little Falls, NY, 1938, pg. 24, col. 1: _ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM_ See directions on page 22 for ice cream. After beating the cream, milk, and Chocolate "Junket" Rennet Mix together, add 1/2 cup chopped nuts and 8 chopped marshmallows. Mix well and freeze. Much before Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream is this from column two: _CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM_ Warm 1/2 cup of the milk and dissolve 2 teaspoons of peanut butter in it. Cool and add to the rest of the milk. Proceed according to directions on page 22 for automatic refrigerator ice cream, using Chocolate "Junket" Rennet Mix. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 02:58:04 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:58:04 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000731152333.0093c440@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Kathleen Miller wrote: > He has me looking into the word livid and how it went from pale-bluish to > enraged. The OED suggests "as if pale with rage." > > Merriam-Webster offers that livid can also mean reddish. I would more readily > associate anger with "reddish" than "pale". > > Which one is it - or is it something else entirely? The OED's first use of _livid_ in the sense "furiously angry" is dated 1912. Here are some earlier examples I have found: 1841 James Fenimore Cooper _The Deerslayer_ II. 109 "Hetty, Hetty -- you know not what you say!" murmured Judith, almost livid with emotion. 1890 Andrew Lang _Red Fairy Book_ 205 When the King ... heard him again reclaiming his money, he became livid with rage. 1895 Stephen Crane _The Red Badge of Courage_ 99 The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. 1907 Francis H. Burnett _The Shuttle_ 48 He was in riding dress and was breathless and livid with anger. This usage probably is very old and not, at least in its origins, "colloquial" (the OED characterizes it as "colloquial" in its entry for the sense). The contexts of the many early uses I have examined make it clear that the color associated with the state of "livid" anger is a pale one. Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 3 03:09:47 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:09:47 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column Message-ID: Fred, what is the date of the Darwin cited? I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association between "livid" and paleness. Frank Abate From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Thu Aug 3 04:48:54 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:48:54 -0500 Subject: Dipstick Message-ID: This piece of humor came across my screen. Is this use of 'dipstick' common? Seems to me there's a similar word that I can't quite recall. DMLance > > Higher gasoline prices caused by the shortage of oil. The less oil > > we have, the higher the price at the pump. There are a lot of folks > > that can't understand how we ran out of oil here in the USA. Well, > > here's the answer: It's simple... nobody bothered to check the oil. > > We didn't know we were getting low! The reason for that is > > obviously geographical, all the oil is in Texas and Oklahoma, and > > all the dipsticks are in Washington, D.C.!!! From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Aug 3 05:32:06 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:32:06 -0700 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <200008030402.VAA25725@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: I wonder if the "camel" pronunciation is South Midland or SM-Southern? Except for one Nebraska source, all of the examples so far suggest this. Growing up in southmost Texas, we had a neighbor family I knew only as the "Camels". It was not until I was a grad student at the Univ. of Texas and had a professor by that name, whom I similarly referred to, that I learned there was a possible different pronunciation when a fellow student irately corrected me to insert the /b/. For years I assumed the Scottish air was referring to actual camels, never associating it with Campbells. Rudy From rkm at SLIP.NET Thu Aug 3 05:42:09 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:42:09 -0700 Subject: Campbell In-Reply-To: <00d701bffcb4$4022d280$2fc654a6@gmsc20b> Message-ID: And you offered no apology??!! >Q: What goes great with Campbell's Soup? >A: Humplings. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 08:44:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 04:44:51 EDT Subject: Sundae; Mexican Chocolate; Blinis; Apple a Day Message-ID: SUNDAE (continued) "Sundae" appeared in several confectionery magazines in the early 1900s. The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL (Philadelphia, PA) is "The oldest paper of its kind in the world, established 1874." The CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE was established in 1881. The CONFECTIONERS' REVIEW (Cincinnati, Ohio) is from about 1900, but the NYPL has just a few issues starting in 1907. The first two are well worth going through for "fudge," "brownie," "egg cream," "ice cream soda," "milk shake," "sundae," and others. Each issue had a recipes column and a column of soda fountain offerings. The NYPL holdings are from the 1890s and 1900s, but I might check the LOC's holdings later. I requested some 1918 volumes, and I'm sure that "Danish Pastry" is in at least one of these publications. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, April 1907, pg. 90, col. 1: _The Sundae_ There is no way in which ice cream is served that is any more popular than what is now almost universally known as the sundae, although in different sections is is variously called college ice, throwover, lollypop and even frappe. The sundae is not a new invention. This method of serving ice is older than the name, and, like many other good things, had its origin in France, where unflavored ice cream was served with a compote of fruit. The name "throwover" comes nearer to being descriptive than any of the other names, for the thing itself is nothing more or less than a portion of ice cream over which a small quantity of syrup or crushed fruit has been thrown or poured. This seems very simple, as, in fact, it is; but at the same time a great deal of taste may be displayed in the preparation of sundaes. They may be served in several ways. A popular way is to use a sundae cup; a champagne glass is also very effective. Champagne glasses may be procured in a variety of patterns, but a plain, thin crystal glass is best. Have a conical ice cream disher of a suitable size, say eight to the quart. Fill this rounded full; then when the cream is turned into the glass it will stand in a perpendicular position. Over this pour a small quantity of the desired syrup or crushed fruit, as the case may be. Place a small glace spoon in the glass and serve with a paper napkin. Serve a glass of plain soda or ice water with every sundae. (Col. 2--ed.) This makes a tempting and refreshing dish, and one that is especially enjoyed by the ladies and young people. Large dispensers, who do not care to use champagne glasses, owing to the amount of bother they cause and the loss by breakage, will find that a small neat sauce dish answers very well. Use the cone of cream in manner described. Such dishes are convenient, because a large number of them can be kept in a small place. The sundae, as a method of serving ice cream, is becoming more popular every year, and every one who serves ice cream should be in a position to serve sundaes to those who desire them. No great outlay is required, and as sundaes are sold in most places at 10 cents there is a good profit in them, and besides, they win many stanch friends. Those who have not tried serving sundaes will find in the proper serving of them a source of much profit and increased patronage. The chief requisites necessary to the serving of a good sundae are pure, high-grade syrups and crushed fruits and a good grade of ice cream.--_Ex._ A large listing of "Nut and Fruit Sundaes" in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, October 1907, pg. 100, does NOT include "hot fudge sundae." From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1908, pg. 91, col. 1: _Sundae, Sunday or Sondi?_ There are several spellings of the name of the confection of ice cream with a fruit syrup poured over it. The original way, apparently, was _sundae_, but where it came from is hard to say. The dictionary doesn't (pg. 91, col. 2--ed.) shed any light on the subject, because the word is not defined there at all. The name got to be bandied about, and on account of its resemblance in sound to the name of the first day in the week, it began to be spelled _Sunday_ for the cheaper grade confectioners. However, the voyager about the city has discovered still another spelling, which in the absence of constituted authority, is as right as any other. One confectioner, whose shop is pretentious, makes it a little bit odder by calling it _sondi_. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, June 1908, pg. 66, col. 3: _The Origin of Sundaes_ Carl T. Pfund, confectioner of La Crosse, Wis., wrote to us on May 6th, giving us the origin of the now popular sundae. In his letter Mr. Pfund says: "Some years ago a young man stepped into a confectionery and called for an ice cream soda, strawberry flavor. As the clerk was about to pour the syrup into the glass he found there was but half an ounce left. Being Sunday, and alone in the store, he did not want to let his customer wait while he prepared some, so he simply placed a little ice cream on a dish and poured over this what syrup he had and added some strawberries on top to make or give it enough strawberry flavor. This dish seemed to make a hit with the customer, and whenever he called after that he would always (pg. 67, col. 1--ed.) ask for the same kind of dish he got last Sunday, and finally calling it his Sunday dish. From this sprang the present endless variety of sundaes. This I believe will explain the origin of the popular sundae of today." From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "Soda Menus" (NO "hot fudge sundae"--ed.), September 1908, pg. 83, col. 1: _SUNDAES_ Cherry; Chocolate; Coffee; Chipped Figs; Caramel Nuts; Club Sandwich; Coney Island; Cantaloupe; Chop Suey (?--ed.); Marshmallow; Delmonico; Maple Nut; Maple Fig; Peach; Pineapple; Raspberry; Sondi di Marron; Strawberry; Knickerbocker; Orange; Sunset. That's from a check of the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL of 1907 and 1908. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN CHOCOLATE (continued) Yet another citation is the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, December 1908, pg. 109, col. 1: MEXICAN CHOCOLATE The way they serve it in Mexico. One egg, one and one-half ounces of chocolate syrup, one teaspoonful of sweet cream, one-half teaspoonful of cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful of salt. Shake well; strain into a cup and add one cupful of hot water. Top with whipped cream and serve with wafers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BLINIS _blintz._ (...) The word is from the Yiddish _blintseh_, via the Russian _blinyets_, and first appeared in English print in 1903. John Mariani, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999). "Blinis of Caviar, Skobeleff" is on pg. 4 of the extensive menu of the St. Nicholas Hotel, Cincinnati, Ohio, Season 1892-93, in the NY Historical Society menu collection. "Blinis a la Czarina" is in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, August 1907, pg. 85, col. 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- AN APPLE A DAY _An apple a day keeps the doctor away._ Eating fruit regularly keeps one healthy. First found as a Welsh folk proverb (1866): "Eat an apple on going to bed, And you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." First attested in the United States in 1913. The proverb is found in varying forms. --Gregory Titelman, RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF POPULAR PROVERBS AND SAYINGS (1996). From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, October 1907, pg. 83, col. 1: People who do not take much exercise should eat at least one or two apples every day, for, as an old proverb says, "Eating an apple every morning means saving a doctor's bill." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD (1939) The index cards of Barry Buchanan's unpublished ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD (1939) have been copied by Carnegie Mellon. It can be borrowed from me. I'm taking the first caller at Bapopik at aol.com... From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 3 09:34:21 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 02:34:21 -0700 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: Some of this sounds like information given by the tour guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I visited there last summer. --- storkrn wrote: > This is in wide circulation on the net with no > attribution or other > identifying data. > > Subject: VERY interesting > > > > Life in the 1500s: > > > > Most people got married in June because they took > > their yearly bath in May and were still smelling > pretty good by > > June. However, they were starting to smell, so > brides carried > > a bouquet of flowers to hide the b.o. > > Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The > man of the house > > had the privilege of the nice clean water, then > all the other sons and > > men, then the women and finally the children. Last > of all the babies. > > By then the water was so dirty you could actually > loose someone in it. > > Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with > the bath water." > > > > Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw, piled > high, with no wood > > underneath. It was the only place for animals to > get warm, so all the > > pets ... dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, > rats, bugs lived > > in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and > sometimes the > > animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence > the saying, "It's > > raining > > cats and dogs." > > > > There was nothing to stop things from falling into > the house. This > > posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and > other droppings > > could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they > found if they made > > beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, > it addressed that > > problem. Hence those beautiful big 4 poster beds > with canopies. > > > > The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something > other than dirt, > > hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had > slate floors which would > > get slippery in the winter when wet. So they > spread thresh on the floor > > to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, > they kept adding > > more thresh until when you opened the door, it > would all start > > slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at > the entry way, > > hence a "thresh hold." > > > > They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that > always hung over > > the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added > things to the pot. They > > mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. > They would eat the > > stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to > get cold overnight and > > then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew > had food in it that > > had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: > peas porridge hot, > > peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine > days old. > > > > Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel > really special > > when that happened. When company came over, they > would > > bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. > It was a sign of > > wealth and that a man "could really bring home the > bacon." They > > would cut off a little to sharewith guests and > would all sit around > > and "chew the fat." > > > > Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food > with a high acid > > content caused some of the lead to leach onto the > food. This happened > > most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating > tomatoes ... for 400 > > years. > > > > Most people didn't have pewter plates, but had > trenchers- a piece of > > wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. > Trencher were never washed > > > > and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After > eating off wormy > > trenchers, they would get "trench mouth." > > > > Bread was divided according to status. Workers got > the burnt bottom > > of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests > got the top, or the > > "upper crust." > > > > Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The > combination would > > sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. > Someone walking along > > the road would take them for dead and prepare them > for burial. They were > > > > laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days > and the family would > > gather around and eat and drink and wait and see > if they would wake up. > > Hence the custom of holding a "wake." > > > > England is old and small and they started running > out of places to > > bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and > would take their bones > > to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these > coffins, one out of > > 25 > > coffins were found to have scratch marks on the > inside and they > > realized they had been burying people alive. So > they thought they would > > tie astring on their wrist and lead it through the > coffin and up through > > > > the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would > have to sit out in the > > graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence > on the "graveyard > > shift" they would know that someone was "saved by > the bell" > > or he was a "dead ringer." > > ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 11:12:19 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:12:19 -0400 Subject: Dipstick In-Reply-To: <3988F9B1.6D5DC4E@missouri.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Donald M. Lance wrote: > This piece of humor came across my screen. Is this use of 'dipstick' > common? Seems to me there's a similar word that I can't quite recall. RHHDAS has an entry for "dipstick," describing it as "partly euphemistic" for "dipshit." Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 11:44:29 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:44:29 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > Fred, what is the date of the Darwin cited? I am taking the quote from the 1898 edition, but it was first published in 1872. > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. Well, it looks like the OED entry misses a major part of the history of "livid" (it refers to paleness in sense c but omits the history that gave rise to sense c). The Merriam-Webster entry is better, picking up as it does the paleness sense which research into early uses of the word reveals to be a common one. I'll try to post some of my evidence later today. Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 00:21:46 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:21:46 +0800 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: At 11:09 PM -0400 8/2/00, Frank Abate wrote: >I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification >of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I >would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association >between "livid" and paleness. > Note that "lividity", as used by doctors (or at least by people who play doctors on television), refers to 'the quality or condition of being livid; a pale-bluish discoloration' as on a bruise, and never to redness. This goes back to a 1477 cite in the OED: This Waun Colour called Lividitie, In Envious Men useth much to be where 'waun' or wan certainly brings out the character of the color larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 00:38:39 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:38:39 +0800 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting In-Reply-To: <20000803093421.27998.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: At 2:34 AM -0700 8/3/00, Margaret Lee wrote: >Some of this sounds like information given by the tour >guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I >visited there last summer. > > >--- storkrn wrote: >> This is in wide circulation on the net with no >> attribution or other >> identifying data. >> >> Subject: VERY interesting >> >> > > > Life in the 1500s: We did discuss (and for the most part explode) these various stories a few months ago when the same post was circulated on ads-l; the discussion should be searchable via the archives. Larry From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 3 13:15:46 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:15:46 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: Rudy wrote: > I wonder if the "camel" pronunciation is South Midland or SM-Southern? I think I'm a datum supporting its being Southern. The reason I say "I think" is that I'm pretty sure I have at least a tiny hint of the [b] in it most of the time now. I'm not sure that I always have, though. Nor did the people around me in childhood since I remember thinking that a neighbor up the street had an odd first name -- his name to my ears was "Camel McCool." I thought being named Camel was weird. Later I learned that it was spelled Campbell. I just did a test on my elderly mother, whom I'm visiting at the moment, but my wise methodology didn't work. I asked her whether she remembered the McCools in our old Jackson neighborhood. She did. I then asked if she remembered the first name of their son. She didn't. Then I asked her if she remembered the last name of my elementary-school friend named Cay. She didn't. (Her memory is off and on these days.) So finally I wrote Campbell and asked her how she pronounced it. There was a [b]. She agreed that she might be pronouncing it more self-consciously when looking at it, though. When I told her why I was asking, her thought about it was the same as mine -- that she thinks she has a little bit of a [b] in it but not very much. She was born January 1914 in Huntsville, AL, but lived most of her life in Mississippi. I was born March 1943 in Jackson, MS, and have spent almost all of my life in Mississippi. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 3 14:03:06 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 09:03:06 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: Another couple of bits of data on the South Midland/Southern theory: 1. There is a town in North Alabama called "Phil Campbell." For natives of PC, while the /b/ is not as evident as the TV pronunciation of "Campbell's Soup," there is still a stop in the middle of "Campbell." I don't think that it can be simplified into /kaeml/ or /kaem at l/. 2. Sometimes in the South (and maybe elsewhere, as well), some religious groups that believe in predestination are called /kaem at laIts/--it's even spelled "Camelites" sometimes. It comes from "Campbellites," the names of followers of a particular Scottish religious leader (I think--religious history is not my forte). Jessie Emerson From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 14:06:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:06:51 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. All right, here are some examples showing the association of "livid" with paleness. I have not been precise about editions and page numbers, because my purpose here is not to trace a first use but rather to illustrate a common association: 1851 Herman Melville _Moby-Dick_ Threading its way out from among his grey hairs ... you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. 1880 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu _The Purcell Papers_ This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. _Id._ Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid. 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson _Treasure Island_ The sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle _The White Compnay_ His swarthy features blanched to a livid gray. 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle _The Adventure of the Yellow Face_ Its colour was what had impressed me most. It was of a livid chalky white. 1897 Bram Stoker _Dracula_ The last unconscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. 1904 Joseph Conrad _Nostromo_ Sotillo's ebony moustache contrasted violently with the livid colouring of his cheeks. 1906 Joseph Conrad _A Set of Six_ Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains, shining with the livid light of snows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 03:06:32 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 11:06:32 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <00a101bffd53$8c95be80$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: At 9:03 AM -0500 8/3/00, Jessie Emerson wrote: >Another couple of bits of data on the South Midland/Southern theory: > >... > >2. Sometimes in the South (and maybe elsewhere, as well), some religious >groups that believe in predestination are called /kaem at laIts/--it's even >spelled "Camelites" sometimes. It comes from "Campbellites," the names of >followers of a particular Scottish religious leader (I think--religious >history is not my forte). > And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. larry From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 14:57:54 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:57:54 -0400 Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? Message-ID: Looking at a lot of evidence that I have at my disposal, including the OED but going far beyond it, and seeing how many colors have been prefixed by the word "livid," and looking at how the adverb "lividly" is used, an answer is beginning to occur to me. Is it possible that "livid" has been used for centuries as an intensifier, that a livid red is an intense red, a livid gray is a very pale gray, etc.? How else to explain a word whose etymological roots relate to blue, but which has been strongly associated with anger, with fear, and with death? At the least, it is clear to me that the history of "livid" is a very complex one, and when I search historical texts for the word I feel I am glimpsing its complexity in a way that no previous lexicographer has done. The OED may have had sufficient evidence to glimpse that complexity, but appears to have failed to put that evidence together in a coherent fashion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Aug 3 15:00:04 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:00:04 -0700 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: rudy troike's message suggests this really wonderful image of the bagpipes skirling "the camels are coming", while lines of dour dromedaries plod through the heather. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 3 15:54:11 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:54:11 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: It's funny, because the first time I heard someone say Camelites, I asked "The nuns?" (the North Alabama pronunciation of Carmelites being something like, although not exactly, /k at rm@laIts/). Jessie Emerson > And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. > > larry From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 3 15:58:20 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 11:58:20 -0400 Subject: Safire's guest column In-Reply-To: Message-ID: August 6th's guest column is by Fred Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 3 16:03:44 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 12:03:44 -0400 Subject: Cam(pb)ell Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky writes: >>>>> extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. <<<<< PING! Ah HA! This resolves a puzzle that has haunted me ... well, bubbled around in the unconscious and occasionally surfaced, leaving me wondering "Why DID they do that?" as well as "Why am I thinking of THAT?" -- since [pause to reckon] the summer of 1965. I was in Corbin, Kentucky, and near where I was staying there was a motel with a sign "Campbell's Motel"* with a picture of a camel. It didn't take me long to realize it was supposed to be a pun on the name, but it always seemed awfully far-fetched to me. Now I get it. * Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL -- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the picture were there. Thanks, Arnold. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 3 16:29:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 12:29:09 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At 12:03 PM 8/3/2000 -0400, you wrote: >* Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL >-- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the >picture were there. > > Mark A. Mandel > Interesting discussion of Cam(pb)ell's. But the above reminds me of a question I've had in mind for awhile, and this is as good a time as any to ask it: What's the commonest term for "greengrocer's apostrophe" here in the US ("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in reference to the US)? Or have language scholars in the US simply adopted what would seem to be a UK-coined and UK-oriented term? Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 3 18:12:05 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:12:05 -0500 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the produce manager the price of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those muskmelons or the cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I asked her what the difference was between the. She said that she thought they were the same but that the produce department made a distinction between the smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, Indiana-grown melon that has natural seams. The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific Armenian variety of Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at Cantelupo, near Rome. Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several different varieties. As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was taught, I'm not sure which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name for what was colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE Michigan also called them all "mushmelon". What distinctions do you find between the two terms among people who are not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? Herb Stahlke From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 06:12:50 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 14:12:50 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <014d01bffd63$10bbdc80$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: At 10:54 AM -0500 8/3/00, Jessie Emerson wrote: >It's funny, because the first time I heard someone say Camelites, I asked >"The nuns?" (the North Alabama pronunciation of Carmelites being something >like, although not exactly, /k at rm@laIts/). > >Jessie Emerson > >> And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those >religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of >sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no >relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. >> > > larry The one possible sticking point here (between at least the Boston (or *a* Boston) pronunciation of "Carmelite" and the relevant Southern pronunciation of "Campbellite", both putatively merging to "Camelite", is the [ae] vowel, which I would guess is a bit longer in the former case. But in a context of discussing religious groups, I'd imagine such a distinction might be ignored. Larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 23:32:22 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 19:32:22 EDT Subject: Quiche; Falafel; Sundae Message-ID: QUICHE (continued) From COOK'S TOUR OF EUROPEAN KITCHENS: THE BEST CONTINENTAL DISHES SUITED TO AN ENGLISH TABLE (Chatto & Windus, London, 1933) by K. and M. von Schumacher, "France, The Gourmet's Paradise," pg. 26: QUICHE 25. Mix together 1 lb. of flour, 6 oz. of butter, 2 eggs, salt, and enough water (about a glass) to obtain a smooth paste. Work it well. Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Spread on your tart tin and raise the edge about 1 inch all round. Fry 2 or 3 fine rashers of fat bacon lightly in butter and cut them into small pieces. Put them on your paste. Beat up 3 eggs and mix them with a cupful of grated Parmesan cheese and enough cream to fill the tart to the edge. Place small pieces of butter here and there and bake 30 to 40 minutes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- FALAFEL (?)(continued) From BANQUETS OF THE NATIONS: EIGHTY-SIX DINNERS CHARACTERISTIC AND TYPICAL EACH OF ITS OWN COUNTRY (J & J Gray & Co., Edinburgh, 1911) by Robert H. Christie, "Palestine (Hebrew)," pg. 483: SALATA HUS WA FLAFIL (Lettuce and Pepper Salad.) Incorporate a lettuce torn into small pieces with a couple of thinly sliced chillies or peppers. Make a dressing of oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SUNDAE (continued) From the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 August 1900, pg. 28, col. 1: _NEW SODA WATER DRINKS._ (...) "What's a Sunday?" asked the reporter, searching for light on feminine taste. "A Sunday? Well, that's something that started in Chicago; but every town has a different name for it. It's only ice cream with fruit syrup poured over it, but it has more names than a Spanish baby. The girls call it Sunday and White Wings and Hobson and Sunshine and Dewey. Now, whenever anyone comes in and asks for something we never heard of, we serve a Sunday, and nine times out of ten it's a good thing." (...)--_The Sun, New York_. From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Fri Aug 4 04:24:23 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 23:24:23 -0500 Subject: Cam(pb)ell Message-ID: Back in 1958 when ZIP Codes first came in, I was living in a town of about 3000 in West Texas (McCamey). A friend of mine was named Richmond Campbell, and most of his friends called him Rich. An acquaintance in Midland (where W is from, kind of) sent him a note and on the envelope drew a money bag and a camel and wrote 79752. A day or so later, the missive was placed in Richmond's PO box. I think I usually, maybe always, say the -b- in Campbell, and maybe always have, but I can't think of the religious groups as anything other than "Camelites" because that's the way Texas members of the group would say the name, though I'd probably say a slight -b- unless I were consciously imitating the "Camelites." DMLance Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Arnold Zwicky writes: > > >>>>> > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends > married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception > for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. > <<<<< > > PING! Ah HA! > > This resolves a puzzle that has haunted me ... well, bubbled around in the > unconscious and occasionally surfaced, leaving me wondering "Why DID they > do that?" as well as "Why am I thinking of THAT?" -- since [pause to > reckon] the summer of 1965. I was in Corbin, Kentucky, and near where I was > staying there was a motel with a sign "Campbell's Motel"* with a picture of > a camel. It didn't take me long to realize it was supposed to be a pun on > the name, but it always seemed awfully far-fetched to me. Now I get it. > > * Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL > -- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the > picture were there. > > Thanks, Arnold. > > -- Mark > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 4 04:37:56 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 21:37:56 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008031629.MAA29870@is2.nyu.edu> Message-ID: Ok, I've never heard it. What is it? Rima From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 04:42:50 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 21:42:50 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: rima mckinzey asks: Ok, I've never heard it. What is it? apostrophe's used for the plural. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 05:15:30 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 01:15:30 EDT Subject: Philadelphia Buns Message-ID: "I promise a Philadelphia bun in every pot." --George W. Bush (paraphrased) (Bush separates the Republicans from the Democrats, who, of course, are jelly doughnuts--ed.) I previously posted "sticky buns." "Philadelphia" was not (or rarely) in the name in the 19th century. Herman Hueg's ILLUSTRATED CAKE BAKER (1892) has "104. Claremont Buns," "105. Corrington Buns," and "238. Bath Buns." Jessup Whitehead's COOKING FOR PROFIT (1893) has "Buns: currant, cinnamon, Chelsea." From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 September 1901, pg. 18, col. 2: _Adelphia Bun._ 2 lbs. flour. 1/2 lb. butter or lard. 3/4 lb. powdered sugar. 2 eggs. 1/2 pint milk (more or less). 3/4 oz. good baking powder. 1/2 lb. currants. 1/4 lb. finely-chopped mixed peels. Any flavor you choose. To mix, sift baking-powder in the flour, cream butter, sugar and eggs, add milk and ammonia, stir in, then add flour and half mix, then add the currants and peel, finish mixing, adding flour or milk, if needed, to form a medium slack mass. When mixed drop them--in size to sell at what price you choose--with a spoon or with your hand, unto greased pans, wash them with egg and milk wash, bake them plain or dust with sugar, as you choose. From AMERICAN COOKERY, October 1916, pg. 217, col. 1: _Philadelphia Butter Buns_ Soften one cake of compressed yeast in one-fourth a cup of lukewarm water; add one cup of scalded and cooled milk and about one cup and a half of bread flour and beat all together until smooth. Cover and set out of draughts to become light. Add one-fourth a cup, each, of melted shortening and sugar, two egg-yolks, beaten light, one teaspoonful of salt, grated rind of one lemon and bread flour for a dough. (About three cups of (Col. 2--ed.) flour will be needed). Knead until smooth and elastic. Cover close and set aside to become doubled in bulk. Turn upside down on a board, roll into a rectangular sheet, brush over with melted butter, dredge with one or two tablespoonfuls of sugar and a teaspoonful of cinnamon, then sprinkle with half a cup of currants and roll as a jelly roll. Cut into pieces about an inch and a quarter long. The dough will make about twenty pieces. Cream one-fourth a cup of shortening; beat in one-fourth a cup of brown sugar and spread the mixture on the inside of a cast iron frying pan of suitable size. Let stand until doubled in bulk. Bake about half an hour. The sugar and butter should glaze the bottom of the buns. Serve, turned upside down, glazed side up. From AMERICAN COOKERY, December 1919, pg. 357, col. 1: _Philadelphia Butter Buns_ Make a sponge of one cake of compressed yeast, one-fourth a cup of water, one cup of scalded milk, and one cup and one-half of bread flour; when light, add one-fourth a cup of sugar, one-fourth a cup of butter, melted; two egg-yolks, one-half a teaspoonful of salt, the grated rind of one lemon, and flour for dough; about two cups of flour will be required. Knead until smooth and elastic. Cover close and set aside to become doubled in bulk. Turn upside down on a board, roll into a rectangular sheet, spread with softened butter, dredge with sugar and cinnamon, sprinkle with currants and rolly as a jelly-roll. Cut into pieces about (Col. 2--ed.) an inch and a quarter long. The dough will make sixteen buns. Butter well the bottom of a pan of proper size and dredge generously with brown sugar; set the buns on the sugar and let become light. Bake in a moderate oven. Turn upside down. The sugar and butter should glaze the bottom of the buns. Three or four tablespoonfuls of butter and a generous half-cup of sugar are none too much on the pan. From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 4 05:18:19 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 22:18:19 -0700 Subject: Footnote on Campbellites In-Reply-To: <200008040400.VAA01047@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: I don't know of any association with predestination, but the movement started in the South by Alexander Campbell evolved into the Disciples of Christ denomination, known usually in the South as the Christian Church, which also gave rise to the Church of Christ, a more conservative and evangelical denomination sometimes referred to as the "non-piano-playing Campbellites". Rudy From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 4 05:26:02 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 22:26:02 -0700 Subject: Texas vs Bostonian vowels In-Reply-To: <200008040400.VAA01047@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: While the usually very front Southern /ae/ can be perceived in Boston as the diaphonemic equivalent of /ar/ [a], the latter is actually phonetically closer to the "Confederate vowel" (Sledd), the monophthongized pronunciation of /ay/. My favorite example of inter- regional differences in interpretation comes from a Texas lady named Kaiser, who on checking into a Boston hotel for an NCTE convention and giving her name to the clerk, saw him write it down as "Carser". Rudy From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 06:04:13 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:04:13 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm talking about the period between the September equinox and the December solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 4 06:54:55 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 23:54:55 -0700 Subject: fall and autumn In-Reply-To: <012001bffdd9$d375b360$7105f9c1@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >... "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist >violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes >me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to >replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. More likely some stylistic rule that makes the change. Reminds me of that list of songs printed somewhere, that included "African-American is the Color of My True Love's Hair." RIma From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 10:40:54 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:40:54 +0100 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: Paul Frank wrote: > > For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, > the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm > talking about the period between the September equinox and the December > solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd > sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald > Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist > violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes > me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to > replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. > Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the Find & Replace option. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 11:09:36 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 13:09:36 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: > Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, > instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for > the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the > Find & Replace option. > --Aaron It may have been an editorial decision at the IHT, but I somehow doubt it. The word autumn crops up every day in the New York Times. Americans are of course free to choose between the words fall and autumn. This is from this morning's edition: "General Motors disclosed last March that it was taking a smaller step in the same direction, using suspension changes to lower the frame rails on its new Chevrolet Blazers, GMC Envoys and Oldsmobile Bravadas by up to two inches as they are introduced this autumn." http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/080400ford-suv.html Britons did once say fall or at least "fall of the leaf." Burchfield explains in The New Fowler's: "The third season of the year was called the autumn from the 14c. onwards, and also, in the British Isles, the fall of the leaf or simply the fall from the 16c. until about 1800. As time passed, autumn settled down as the regular term in Britain, whereas the fall of the leaf (less frequently the fall of the year) and then fall by itself gradually became standard in America from the late 17c. onwards. Autumn and fall are familiar names to everyone in each of the two countries, but in day-to-day speech autumn is the only standard form in BrE and fall is equally standard in AmE." In 1965 Sir Ernest Gowers remarked "As was said in [H.W. Fowler's] The King's English, fall is better on the merits than autumn in every way, and we once had as good a right to it as the Americans, but we have chosen to let the right lapse." Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 11:26:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 07:26:51 -0400 Subject: Autumn & Fall in NYT Message-ID: Searches of the New York Times online show that "fall" is used four or five times as often as "autumn" in the New York Times, even if one uses searches that avoid non-season meanings of the word "fall." Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:06:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Fred Shapiro To: American Dialect Society Cc: millerk at nytimes.com Subject: Re: question for safire's column On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. All right, here are some examples showing the association of "livid" with paleness. I have not been precise about editions and page numbers, because my purpose here is not to trace a first use but rather to illustrate a common association: 1851 Herman Melville _Moby-Dick_ Threading its way out from among his grey hairs ... you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. 1880 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu _The Purcell Papers_ This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. _Id._ Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid. 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson _Treasure Island_ The sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle _The White Compnay_ His swarthy features blanched to a livid gray. 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle _The Adventure of the Yellow Face_ Its colour was what had impressed me most. It was of a livid chalky white. 1897 Bram Stoker _Dracula_ The last unconscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. 1904 Joseph Conrad _Nostromo_ Sotillo's ebony moustache contrasted violently with the livid colouring of his cheeks. 1906 Joseph Conrad _A Set of Six_ Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains, shining with the livid light of snows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From stevek at SHORE.NET Fri Aug 4 12:05:34 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:05:34 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008040442.VAA14459@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Arnold Zwicky wrote: > apostrophe's used for the plural. do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" etc. --- Steve K. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 02:20:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:20:35 +0800 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 8:05 AM -0400 8/4/00, Steve K. wrote: >On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Arnold Zwicky wrote: > >> apostrophe's used for the plural. > >do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? > >"fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" >etc. > >--- Steve K. To respond to the earlier query: Yes, the label is very British-sounding, since "greengrocer" is not really used this side of the pond to my knowledge, but since the apostrophe is used for plurals here too (the questions of when and by whom and why were discussed on ads-l and Linguist List a few years ago) and since there's no alternate label for the phenomenon, we just borrowed it from our transpondian cousins. I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. larry From RonButters at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 14:34:45 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:34:45 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. From jester at PANIX.COM Fri Aug 4 14:42:42 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:42:42 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: from "RonButters@AOL.COM" at Aug 04, 2000 10:34:45 AM Message-ID: > > In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > > << I don't know ANY label for the > innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> > > Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. You're nodding here, Ron! Scare quotes are different--these are quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way (e.g. the thing being quoted is not the usual term, or represents a troublesome viewpoint, or whatever). _Scare quotes_ refer to one possible correct use of quotes. The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. Jesse Sheidlower From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Fri Aug 4 14:46:08 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:46:08 -0400 Subject: "scare quotes" Message-ID: I've seen these quotes used often in display ads in the Yellow Pages. I speculate that they are used in some cases because they do attract attention, and are easier to specify in writing the ad copy than showing italic or bold face, which the writer may not know how to specify, if not an experienced copy editor. I suspect that many Yellow Pages ads are written by store owners and such, who most likely do not know proofreader's marks. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 02:53:09 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:53:09 +0800 Subject: fall and autumn In-Reply-To: <398A9DB6.1D272D18@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: At 11:40 AM +0100 8/4/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >Paul Frank wrote: >> >> For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, >> the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm >> talking about the period between the September equinox and the December >> solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd >> sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald >> Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist >> violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes >> me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to >> replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. >> > >Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, >instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for >the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the >Find & Replace option. > >--Aaron As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on the autumn of a sparrow. --Larry ================= August 1, 2000, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 9; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: German Faults 'Silence' About Attacks on Immigrants BYLINE: By ROGER COHEN DATELINE: BERLIN, July 31 ... Many Germans with no sympathy for rightist violence are troubled by the large number of foreigners, particularly Turks, in the country and by suggestions that Germany must embrace multiculturalism. As a result, politicians have been generally hesitant to broach the questions raised this weekend by Mr. Fischer. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has become a fact of German life. It is ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ rooted principally in the east, where, since the collapse of the Communist state there, youth unemployment has remained high, alienation widespread and broad exposure to foreigners a novelty. ================ From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 14:59:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 15:59:15 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: > In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > > << I don't know ANY label for the > innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> > > Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. > I don't think those are scare quotes, though. To me, scare quotes can be paraphrased as 'so-called' or 'nudge-nudge, wink-wink'--they indicate that the writer doesn't really intend the meaning or the attitude implied by the phrasing. As in: Joe loves his "vitamins" but I just hope the cops don't catch him with those pills. (I.e., we all know Joe's vitamins are really quaaludes or some such thing.) But what Steve and Larry were talking about was the use of quote marks for emphasis. This sign at a library used to drive me crazy (still does when I think about it): "Absolutely" "NO CHANGE" will be given for the copy machines (quote marks as in original) Here, we don't have the reversal-of-intention indicated by scare quotes. The quote marks are just used as a kind of underscoring. I think we did talk about these once before here and called them 'emphatic quotes' or some such thing, but they don't seem to have an established name. Drives me crazy. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jessie at SIRSI.COM Fri Aug 4 15:02:25 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:02:25 -0500 Subject: Texas vs Bostonian vowels Message-ID: rudy troike wrote... > While the usually very front Southern /ae/ can be perceived in Boston as the diaphonemic equivalent of /ar/ [a], the latter is actually phonetically closer to the "Confederate vowel" (Sledd), the monophthongized pronunciation of /ay/. And I believe the "Confederate vowel" is different from what I was describing in North Alabama, where the dialect is not Coastal Southern (monopthongized /ay/), but Highland Southern (at least those were the generalized groupings I remember), where most everything is raised. Jessie Emerson (who is quite rusty at phonological descriptions) From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 4 14:54:34 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:54:34 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At 10:42 AM 8/4/2000 -0400, you wrote: >The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", >is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. > >Jesse Sheidlower > While we're at it, why not simply "emphatic quotes"? Generalized emphasis certainly seems to be the common factor in this kind of usage of quotation marks. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 15:20:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:20:15 +0100 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: > As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software > decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times > of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I > wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on > the autumn of a sparrow. > > --Larry Such editing errors are not uncommon in newspapers. I used to have a small collection (I suppose I still do, somewhere) of examples of "African American" being substituted for "black" by search-and-replace methods at newspapers. My favorite was about a company being "back in the African-American." One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how non-literal newspapers are about quote marks (as anyone who's ever been misquoted knows). Americans are regularly Anglified in foreign newspapers, and vice versa. I remember being struck by this when reading a South African newspaper's interview with Macaulay Culkin (surely, picked up from a news service, rather than interviewed there), in which MC complains that his "Mum" still makes him "tidy my room" (surely he said "Mom" and "pick up my room", the latter of which would be incomprehensible to South Africans). I suppose this is considered OK in the context of quoting, just as quotes would be preserved in translations into another language. But it usually annoys literalist me. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From RonButters at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 15:34:54 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:34:54 EDT Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" Message-ID: Well, it will be fun to tell my Intro to Linguistics class next semester about how even someone as brilliant and experienced as I am can walk around for years with a slightly idiosyncratic definition in his head for a term of art in his own profession and not notice that he was marching to a different flautist. Jesse S defines SCARE QUOTES as "quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way." YES!--and I've always assumed that "worthy of attention in some way" included the desire merely to be emphatic (as well as ironic). Sol, I guess, do most of the people who sell "fresh" vegetables. Still, if Jesse and Lynne Murphy (not to mention the NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, which I have just consulted) says I'm "wrong" about the definition of "scare" quotes, then I will just have to revise my mental lexical entry. I have always used the term SCARE QUOTES to refer to any quotation marks that do not appear actually to quote anybody, without speculat ing as to the motive of the writer. I guess my overgeneralized interpretation of the term stems from the very fact that there "is" no distinct, widely known American term for purely emphatic quotation marks (except maybe "emphatic quotation marks"?). That and the fact that using quotation marks purely for emphasis seems pretty scaring to me. And the fact that it is often not possible to tell the "scare" quotes from the "emphatic" quotes (can anyone tell me which of the sets of quotation marks in my this paragraph are "scare" quotes and which are "emphatic" quotes???--I must say, I like my deviant usage even if it is "wrong"). So the sign-painter who wrote "HANDICAP" PARKING on the sign in my local supermarket parking lot is not using scare quotes--unless she means to imply that the parking place so designated is for anyone who might use one of those special parking passes, whether actually qualified by disability or not? Wow! and, for that matter, "Wow!" In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:43:09 AM, jester at PANIX.COM writes: << You're nodding here, Ron! Scare quotes are different--these are quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way (e.g. the thing being quoted is not the usual term, or represents a troublesome viewpoint, or whatever). _Scare quotes_ refer to one possible correct use of quotes. >> Lynne Murphy writes: <> From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:31:40 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:31:40 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: steve k.: do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" no. for one thing, they're not scarequotes. scarequotes are quotes (that is, quotation marks) used for one of their legitimate functions; the name "scarequote" denotes both form and function. if i said that, i should also be talking about the "greengrocer's possessive apostrophe". this would not be helpful terminology. i don't in fact have a special term for quotes used for emphasis. not even "greengrocer's quotes", though that would make sense. actually, i don't expect most americans to understand "greengrocer's apostrophe". i try to use it only when i think my audience will have heard the term already. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 4 16:17:04 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 09:17:04 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: --- Arnold Zwicky wrote: > steve k.: > > do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? > "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" >.... > actually, i don't expect most americans to > understand "greengrocer's > apostrophe". i try to use it only when i think my > audience will > have heard the term already. > > arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: is this peculiar to greengrocers only, is this common to all merchants, or is this use so common or widespread throughout all aspects of writing and printing in England that it is considered an accepted use of the apostrophe? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:51:33 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:51:33 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: ron butters: In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. if larry is like me, he knows this term perfectly well, but doesn't have this meaning for it. i would imagine that the meaning he has is one given in the NSOED for SCARE-QUOTES: quotation marks placed round a word or phrase to draw attention to an unusual or arguably inaccurate use. this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), posting from home, where there's only a NSOED and an AHD3 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 16:12:08 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 17:12:08 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: James Smith asked: > > I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out > what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: > is this peculiar to greengrocers only, is this common > to all merchants, or is this use so common or > widespread throughout all aspects of writing and > printing in England that it is considered an accepted > use of the apostrophe? It's just called a greengrocer's apostrophe b/c one sees it a lot in hand written signs. It's found everywhere, but it's not accepted by those who know how to wield an apostrophe. I don't think that typical British people are more likely than Americans to know what 'greengrocer's apostrophe' refers to. That term is pretty much editing/prescriptivist jargon. While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 4 16:35:11 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 12:35:11 -0400 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: Margaret Lee writes: >>>>> Some of this sounds like information given by the tour guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I visited there last summer. --- storkrn wrote: > This is in wide circulation on the net with no > attribution or other > identifying data. > > Subject: VERY interesting > > > > Life in the 1500s: > > [140 lines of double-quoted jokelore snipped -- MAM] <<<<< I'd call it MISinformation. And please, there was no need to quote the whole blame thing. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 4 16:40:31 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 12:40:31 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Gregory {Greg} Downing writes: >>>>> What's the commonest term for "greengrocer's apostrophe" here in the US ("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in reference to the US)? Or have language scholars in the US simply adopted what would seem to be a UK-coined and UK-oriented term? <<<<< My experience and personal usage history support your latter guess. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 17:06:36 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 18:06:36 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008031629.MAA29870@is2.nyu.edu> Message-ID: > >("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in >reference to the US)? In my lifetime, I don't ever remember seeing an actual greengrocer. It's always been a supermarket (or whatever your dialectal variant is). But, I do remember on channel 5 in Phoenix there was a feature on the news once a week or so with a guy talking about fresh produce. I (mis-)remember him having the title of greengrocer. Before the pervasive supermarkets, what were the people who selled fresh produce called? Besides farmers. --Aa "I'm feeling like a young whipersnapper" ron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 17:10:28 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:10:28 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: From: Laurence Horn > As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software > decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times > of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I > wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on > the autumn of a sparrow. > Many Germans with no sympathy for rightist violence are troubled by > the large number of foreigners, particularly Turks, in the country > and by suggestions that Germany must embrace multiculturalism. As a > result, politicians have been generally hesitant to broach the > questions raised this weekend by Mr. Fischer. > > Since the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has > become a fact of German life. It is > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > rooted principally in the east, where, since the collapse of the > Communist state there, youth unemployment has remained high, > alienation widespread and broad exposure to foreigners a novelty. There I was thinking that when I read a New York Times article in the International Herald Tribune I was actually reading a New York Times article. Thanks for checking and sorry to have wasted bandwidth on this, but (idle) curiosity got the better of me. I wrote my comment in a spirit of what the Chinese call "pao zhuan yin yu": throwing a brick and getting a piece of jade in return, i.e. putting forth my inexpert opinion to induce another's learned response. That's how I feel about the American Dialect Society. As a non-linguist I find this list to be a pleasure to read. And an education. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:16:07 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:16:07 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: james smith: I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: is this peculiar to greengrocers only, by no means. the name "greengrocer's apostrophe" merely suggests that greengrocers' signs are a common habitat for this particular species of apostrophe. is this common to all merchants, very common in advertising designed by merchants themselves. or is this use so common or widespread throughout all aspects of writing and printing in England it is widespread indeed in the writing of ordinary people, people who are not (in some sense) professional writers. and not just in england. for a while i was collecting examples from student papers in linguistics courses at ohio state, but they were just *too* frequent [note "usenet asterisks" for emphasis] for me to cope with. that it is considered an accepted use of the apostrophe? no, not in serious/professional/formal writing contexts, where it universally counts as an error to be corrected before publication (except in certain special circumstances, like the pluralization of letter names and numbers, where some or all style books call for an apostrophe). on the other hand, in what you might call "vernacular spelling", the greengrocer's apostrophe is so common, as a variant of the unpunctuated plural (i haven't come across a writer who uses apostrophe+S as mark of the plural 100% of the time it's available[1]), that it would be reasonable to think of it as part of norms for vernacular written english. in any case, the greengrocer's apostrophe seems so natural to so many writers of english - it's not the result of some sort of lapse of attention - that an account is called for. whatever its historical source might have been, it seems to fit right into the system of vernacular spelling. my hypothesis is that once writers have learned the use of apostrophe+S to mark the possessive, they generalize it from this one grammatical function with nouns to *all* grammatical functions of S with nouns (plural as well as possessive), and even to all grammatical functions of S (including the 3rd singular present with verbs - my ohio state data include things like "Mrs. Haas want's cheerleaders" [note unpunctuated plural!]). note that to do this, writers must tacitly appreciate the notion of "grammatical function", since they distinguish word-final S that is grammatically significant from other instances of word-final S: there's no tendency to spell KISS as KIS'S, PERHAPS as PERHAP'S, not to mention NERVOUS as NERVOU'S or PUS as PU'S. as usual, to make a common "error", you have to understand quite a bit about the structure of the language (and, also, in this case, something about the spelling system). [1] for most vernacular writers, apostrophe+S seems not to be available for pluralizing words that end in S: CLASS'S for CLASSES is rare. on the other hand, HORSE'S for HORSES is common, so this is entirely a matter of spelling, not pronunciation. i don't know what the facts are for words ending in SH, CH, TCH, etc.: ?BUSH'S, ?PEACH'S, ?BATCH'S. surely someone has studied this. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:43:51 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:43:51 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Fri, Aug 4, 2000 6:06 PM +0100 "Aaron E. Drews" wrote: > Before the pervasive supermarkets, what were the people who selled > fresh produce called? Besides farmers. > If there was a time in the U.S. when there were separate stores for produce and nonperishable foods, I'm not old enough to remember it, or didn't live in the right parts of the country. I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to that time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those who owned or managed them, "grocers." These stores sold both fresh and canned/packaged/frozen food. The larger ones usually housed a separately owned and operated butcher shop that sold only meats. They did not sell drug store items like medicines (though they may have sold a few Band-Aids, some Aspirin and perhaps a few very basic cosmetics, like hand cream--that I don't remember), nor toys, shoes, clothes, etc. > > --Aa "I'm feeling like a young whipersnapper" ron I, on the other hand, can't believe that what I just wrote counts as "history" instead of "the way it was about a couple of years ago." Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:45:24 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: lynne murphy: While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily determined by very general principles of english spelling that even careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. we've got a prenominal possessive consisting of a base nominal word and an S marking the possessive. massively, quite generally, such words should - must - be spelled with an apostrophe. any rational person would want an apostrophe here too. as it happens, the standard spelling system makes an exception for definite personal pronouns (even ONE'S and SOMEONE'S etc. have an apostrophe), for reasons that aren't relevant here and wouldn't be known by ordinary people anyway, and ITS is the *only* one of these that is both transparently segmentable into subject pronoun plus S and usable prenominally. the spelling of possessive ITS (versus KIT'S) should offend anyone who craves system, generalizations, etc. and it does. i can argue for the semiotic utility of possessive 'S versus the unpunctuated plural and verb form, but i can't defend possessive ITS, the spelling of which runs just counter to good semiotic principles. i'll continue to spell it without an apostrophe, just as i'll continue to spell the verb LOSE, but i can't defend either of these spellings on rational grounds, and i won't waste any time tut-tutting at people who spell them "wrong". arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:25:47 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 13:25:47 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to that > time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those who They're still called "grocery stores" by many people, including me. I hear "grocery store" far, far more often than "supermarket." I say "grocery store" always. I don't think I've ever uttered the word "supermarket." During my childhood, a grocery store was often referred to simply as "the store." E.g., "She's not here right now. She went to the store." --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 18:34:46 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:34:46 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky: > lynne murphy: > > While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam > Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth > experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of > the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. True that this is a different issue, but not totally unrelated, I think, since I think it indicates a general confusion about apostrophes. The same promotional table-menu also used an apostrophe to pluralize TV. (They're giving away TV's.) But some people don't balk at apostrophes in pluralizing acronyms/abbreviations, proper names (my mom insists on "The Murphy's"), and decades (the 90's). Students and (copy-editing) clients often say, when I mark a greengrocer's apostrophe in their writing (or when they try to convince me that I need one in a plural I've made), that without the apostrophe, the plural just doesn't _look right_. And so it seems to me that the proliferation of apostrophes in style-book unsanctioned places has something to do with the perception that words with suffixed 's' need punctuations to 'look right'. Since copyediting has gone out the window at many publishers' and advertisers' offices, and since the written word has become more democratic now that you don't need a printing press to get your typed thoughts to millions, I expect that traditional use of apostrophes is a lost cause. But in the meantime, I'm all for standardization of punctuation in writing (punctuation can make or break readability), and the old standards are all we have that can be called standard. > i can argue for the semiotic utility of possessive 'S versus the > unpunctuated plural and verb form, but i can't defend possessive ITS, > the spelling of which runs just counter to good semiotic principles. > i'll continue to spell it without an apostrophe, just as i'll continue > to spell the verb LOSE, but i can't defend either of these spellings > on rational grounds, and i won't waste any time tut-tutting at people > who spell them "wrong". There's nothing rational about English pronouns, so far as I can tell. (If it's _himself_ and _themselves_, why not _youself_ and _usselves_? If _it's_ should be an OK possessive, what about _her's_ and _their's_?) But in my experience, people do _want_ to use them in the standard ways, they just don't always know how to do that. I do think it's something worth continuing to teach, and when I see advertisers misusing them, I don't feel bad at all about tut-tutting at them. Advertisers misinform us about enough things that I am happy to take offense at their role in confusing people about apostrophes! (Kellogg's cereals and BASF tapes are on my IT'S list as well!) OK, I'll shut up now. I promise. No more on apostrophes from me. Lynne From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:40:33 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:40:33 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041825.NAA01655@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: --On Fri, Aug 4, 2000 1:25 PM -0500 Natalie Maynor wrote: > Peter McGraw wrote: > >> I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to >> that time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those >> who > > They're still called "grocery stores" by many people, including me. > I hear "grocery store" far, far more often than "supermarket." I say > "grocery store" always. I don't think I've ever uttered the word > "supermarket." > > During my childhood, a grocery store was often referred to simply as > "the store." E.g., "She's not here right now. She went to the store." > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." I, too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means a food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department store, for instance. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Fri Aug 4 18:30:36 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 14:30:36 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041745.KAA01416@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: It's an important question. The answer: IT'S's No problem. bob > From: Arnold Zwicky > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily > determined by very general principles of english spelling that even > careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's > apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i > only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. From dumasb at UTK.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:32:49 2000 From: dumasb at UTK.EDU (Bethany K. Dumas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 14:32:49 -0400 Subject: Newed help re ILS Request Message-ID: The UT library (Dep't of Interlibrary Srervice) just told me that they cannot find the ff. item anywhere: > CITATION REQUEST: > TI TITLE (ENGLISH AND NON-ENGLISH): Teaching Suprasegmental Features of > Network English to Brazilian Portuguese Learners > AU AUTHOR(S): Rabello,-Elizabeth > SO SOURCE (JOURNAL CITATION): CTJ-Journal; 1999, 37, Mar, 20-24. > JN JOURNAL TITLE: CTJ-Journal > CO CODEN: CTJJET > DT DOCUMENT TYPE: aja Abstract-of-Journal-Article > LA LANGUAGE: English > CP COUNTRY OF PUBLICATION: Brazil > PY PUBLICATION YEAR: 1999 If you have access to the article, please wrirte me privately. Thanks, Bethany From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:36:48 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:36:48 -0700 Subject: those low vowels again Message-ID: back on 26 july, discussing "barak" vs. "arafat", i said: the second vowel of "barak" is almost invariably back well, now i've heard a CBC announcer ("As It Happens") interviewing various people about the talks, and she resolutely had a front vowel for the stressed vowel of "barak". most of the people she interviewed had a back vowel, but one had a front vowel throughout - whether as part of his variety or as an accommodation to her, i couldn't of course tell. my impression is that in certain contexts, like proper names, the two vowels count, in some sense, as being equivalents, despite their being clearly distinctive elsewhere in the language. what i mean is that i suspect that many (?most) speakers don't even register the vowel quality differences between "bar[a]k" and "bar[ae]k", etc., and probably couldn't tell you which vowel someone they were talking to had used. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Fri Aug 4 19:12:48 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 15:12:48 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: In editing a manuscript recently, I confronted the accordion of the greengrocer's apostrophe placed after double quotes, which seemed a bit much to.me. So I made a bold edit, and lopped out the apostrophe, changing people who drop their "r"'s to people who drop their "r"s. Good thing the r-dropping wasn't at the end of a direct quotation! Those would be scare quotes for sure! Joe Pickett Bob Haas on 08/04/2000 02:30:36 PM Please respond to American Dialect Society To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU cc: (bcc: Joe Pickett/Trade/hmco) Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) It's an important question. The answer: IT'S's No problem. bob > From: Arnold Zwicky > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily > determined by very general principles of english spelling that even > careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's > apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i > only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 4 21:29:35 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:29:35 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into "gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house now".) GAT From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 11:54:00 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:54:00 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels (and scare quotes) In-Reply-To: <14DBD9D6380@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: At 4:29 PM -0500 8/4/00, GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer >named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine >Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. >C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs >on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: > "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." >When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into >"gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend >was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what >misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house >now".) > I have a tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers (the "Singin' Brakeman"--to use a pair of non-scare, non-emphatic quotes) that includes the song "In the Jail House Now", so it's evidently a Jimmie Rodgers song (or did Rodgers borrow it from elsewhere?). It's sung by Steve Earle, who employs a [b] in both Campbell and gamble. The opening couplet, as sung here, is actually I had a friend named Campbell He used to rob, steal and gamble (but as it develops he drank a lot too). >(I don't recall what misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house now".) Well, since you asked... He went tomcattin' one night When he started a big fight And a big policeman came and knocked him down He's in the jail house now. I told him over again Quit drinkin' whiskey, lay off of that gin. He's in the jail house now. As for those "fresh" quotes, I certainly do use "scare quotes" all the time, a term I first learned in philosophers' circles, but never for what I'd be happy to call "emphatic quotes". Glad to see Jesse, Lynne, Arnold and others had the same take. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 12:12:24 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:12:24 +0800 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" In-Reply-To: <200008041716.KAA01050@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Thanks to Arnold for his (predictably) great post on the principles underlying these wayward ''s (note that those are two apostrophes, not a double quote), but I seem to recall at least one additional parameter that emerged in our earlier discussion of these: their prevalence after (orthographic-)vowel-final nouns, as well as (or especially in) foreign imports. That is, I've seen "taco's" or "burrito's" more often than, say, radio's or tomato(e)'s (although I'd expect "tomato's" more often than "tomatoe's", as the apostrophe seems correlated with some sort of islandhood for the noun undergoing pluralization. Or maybe those plurals in -os just don't look quite kosher, so the apostrophe is discreetly placed between them as a revival of the old practice of bundling (to change ethnic metaphors), just to keep the -o and -s from getting too intimate with each other. Larry P.S. Cf. also "Chevy's", for those for whom neither "Chevys" nor "Chev(v)ies" looks right. In fact, I'm beginning to be convinced there is a connection between the above and those equally wayward apostrophes in pluralized names ("the Horn's"). Maybe this islandhood-preservation thing is part of the story? From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 00:23:25 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:23:25 -0400 Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: When I was in journalism school at UNC, I learned the term orphan quotes, which referred as I remember it, to those quote marks thrown in for emphasis. A little bit of spice, I suppose, and orphaned because the material within came not from an actual quote. I suppose that they are free-floating quotes, which writers can reach up and pull from the air in order to pepper their writing with emphasis and excitement. Is anybody familiar with the term? bob > From: Laurence Horn > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:54:00 +0800 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: On Campbells and camels (and scare quotes) > > As for those "fresh" quotes, I certainly do use "scare quotes" all > the time, a term I first learned in philosophers' circles, but never > for what I'd be happy to call "emphatic quotes". Glad to see Jesse, > Lynne, Arnold and others had the same take. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 12:40:25 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:40:25 +0800 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:34 AM -0400 8/4/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >Still, if Jesse and Lynne Murphy (not to mention the NEW OXFORD ENGLISH >DICTIONARY, which I have just consulted) says I'm "wrong" about the >definition of "scare" quotes, then I will just have to revise my mental >lexical entry. I have always used the term SCARE QUOTES to refer to any >quotation marks that do not appear actually to quote anybody, without speculat >ing as to the motive of the writer. I guess my overgeneralized interpretation >of the term stems from the very fact that there "is" no distinct, widely >known American term for purely emphatic quotation marks (except maybe >"emphatic quotation marks"?). That and the fact that using quotation marks >purely for emphasis seems pretty scaring to me. And the fact that it is often >not possible to tell the "scare" quotes from the "emphatic" quotes (can >anyone tell me which of the sets of quotation marks in my this paragraph are >"scare" quotes and which are "emphatic" quotes???--I must say, I like my >deviant usage even if it is "wrong"). > >So the sign-painter who wrote "HANDICAP" PARKING on the sign in my local >supermarket parking lot is not using scare quotes--unless she means to imply >that the parking place so designated is for anyone who might use one of those >special parking passes, whether actually qualified by disability or not? > I think the key is that the wielder of scare quotes is sophisticated enough to (purport to) know the accurate use of a given term and uses the quotes to indicate that the term in question is not to be taken at face value (it's a cousin of the similarly metalinguistic "[sic]"), while the user of what we're calling emphatic quotes is too unsophisticated to NOT know that quotes are not ("correctly") used for marking emphasis. larry From P2052 at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 02:35:40 2000 From: P2052 at AOL.COM (P2052 at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:35:40 EDT Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" Message-ID: I don't get it. I've never heard of scare quotes, but I do know that quotation marks are used to enclose words used in a special or ironic sense. For emphasis, words are rendered in bold print or capital letters, or are underlined or italicized (or any combination of the preceding). In fact, almost any unusual presentation of a word will draw attention to it, including enclosing it in quotation marks; however, the grammar books/style manuals that I've used as a guide do not cite quotation marks as a device for emphasizing a word. P-A-T From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sat Aug 5 03:07:37 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:07:37 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: And Colonel Sanners advertised his finger-lickin' chicken without a -g-. DMLance GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer > named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine > Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. > C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs > on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: > "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." > When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into > "gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend > was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what > misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house > now".) > > GAT From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:33:05 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:33:05 +0800 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:35 PM -0400 8/4/00, P2052 at AOL.COM wrote: >I don't get it. I've never heard of scare quotes, but I do know that >quotation marks are used to enclose words used in a special or ironic sense. >For emphasis, words are rendered in bold print or capital letters, or are >underlined or italicized (or any combination of the preceding). In fact, >almost any unusual presentation of a word will draw attention to it, >including enclosing it in quotation marks; however, the grammar books/style >manuals that I've used as a guide do not cite quotation marks as a device for >emphasizing a word. P-A-T They wouldn't mention it (except for purposes of condemnation), any more than they'd mention putting in apostrophe's [sic] as an alternate device for indicating plurality. Both are vernacular practices, not authorized by prescriptive grammars or attested in most descriptive ones, but (for better or worse) neither is particularly rare in the English-speaking (or rather English-writing) world. Larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 05:21:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 01:21:50 EDT Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: "So I rounded up all my electrical appliances...and I said look, I know what's going on, and cut it out!...So then I got in the elevator, and I pressed the button, and the doors closed, and it refused to move. And the elevator said to me, I heard what you did to the toaster." --Woody Allen, "Electrical Appliances," a routine from his live stand-up comedy album of the 1960s. I have never felt the urge to talk to my refrigerator. "The Interent Home" is featured on AOL News today. You'll soon be able to talk to all of your electrical appliances. You can wake up and greet your coffee pot with "Wassup?" Here, from the story, are some terms we might have coming: HAM-CAM--Whirlpool is even considering installing a camera inside the oven so cooks can check on a roast from the office (or anywhere). A. Jared Headley, a Cisco manager who helped design the home, and his co-workers call it the "ham-cam." HOME INTEGRATORS--And before much longer, Cisco predicts, a huge market will develop for what it calls "home integrators," or companies that will wire your home, install everything, sell you a range of services, and make sure everything keeps working. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 05:58:17 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 01:58:17 -0400 Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Congratulations, Fred, a clear case of livid genius. Seriously, your research seems to indicate that livid is, if not all things, several different things to many different people. Livid kudos, bob > From: Fred Shapiro > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:57:54 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? > > Is it possible that "livid" has been > used for centuries as an intensifier, that a livid red is an intense red, > a livid gray is a very pale gray, etc.? How else to explain a word whose > etymological roots relate to blue, but which has been strongly associated > with anger, with fear, and with death? From rkm at SLIP.NET Sat Aug 5 06:07:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:07:28 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041551.IAA29766@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: >this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as >hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of >us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within >the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. Excellent point, actually. More frequently, the restaurants who say "fresh" are actually using from frozen or concentrated orange juice. Now I'll only get annoyed at the non-freshness, not the quotes as well. I've gotten into the habit of asking the server "Is this fresh, fresh - from a live orange?" And I know we've had a discussion already on doubling. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Sat Aug 5 06:07:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:07:28 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <754588.3174378033@dhcp-218-202-123.linfield.edu> Message-ID: re the names for the people- As a kid, the grocery store sold staples - like flour/canned goods/etc. My mother might say (after sending me on an errand) "Ask the grocer... Other comestibles were purchased separately. The butcher sold meat (Ask the butcher for...). However, while we would go to the fish market and the produce stand - I have no recollection at all of what those proprietors were called. Maybe my mother never had me ask them questions? Rima From lmedu at JPS.NET Sat Aug 5 09:25:21 2000 From: lmedu at JPS.NET (Sharon Vaipae) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 02:25:21 -0700 Subject: apostrophe catastrope Message-ID: >this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as >hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of >us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within >the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. This may have some connection with the fresh frozen tuna at my local supermarket (and refusing to accept the loss of traditional apostrophes use, I am doing my best to teach plural vs possessive to my students). Sharon Vaipae LMedu at jps.net English teacher at Duncan-Russell High School, Tracy, CA The truth shall make you odd. -Flannery O'Conner From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Sat Aug 5 12:20:51 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:20:51 +0100 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: <200008041836.LAA02038@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer (...on Ehud Barak) This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. Thanks, Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Sat Aug 5 13:10:01 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 08:10:01 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." I, > too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means a > food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department store, > for instance. This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about others of you? I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:14:03 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 09:14:03 -0500 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) Message-ID: Aaron, You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is from Nebraska. As to the relationship between Canadian English and Standard Spoken American English, you first have to narrow what you mean by Canadian English. The Maritimes and Labrador and Newfoundland have some pretty distinctive dialects, but if you go with southern Ontario you have some that shares quite a lot with Inland Northern. In fact, my own Canadian Raising, and I'm from south of Detroit, is pretty much like what you hear across the Detroit River. Shifting between Ontario Canadian and Inland Northern is not difficult. Herb Stahlke <<< aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK 8/ 5 7:25a >>> >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer (...on Ehud Barak) This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. Thanks, Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:17:53 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:17:53 -0400 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Aaron E. Drews wrote: > English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Peter Jennings. (Tom Brokaw is American.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:19:39 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:19:39 -0400 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Aaron E. Drews wrote: > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? And Robert MacNeil. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:40:10 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:40:10 EDT Subject: common practices in descriptive "grammars" Message-ID: In a message dated 8/4/2000 11:42:17 AM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes: << ... scarequotes are quotes (that is, quotation marks) used for one of their legitimate functions; the name "scarequote" denotes both form and function. ... >> In a message dated 8/4/2000 11:32:12 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << Both are vernacular practices, not authorized by prescriptive grammars or attested in most descriptive ones, but (for better or worse) neither is particularly rare in the English-speaking (or rather English-writing) world. >> I realize that we are talking here about punctuation, which is normally not much discussed in "descriptive grammars," but even so doesn't it logically follow from the above that "descriptive" statements that ignore commonplace linguistic practices are failing their descriptivist duty? I'm a little confused when linguists of the stature of Arnold Zwicky use--even if only as a kind of shorthand--terms such as "legitimate" to describe commonplace practices such as scare quotes, thereby consigning emphatic quotation marks to "illegitimacy." From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:47:06 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:47:06 EDT Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace Message-ID: LIES & STATISTICS This is from "Everything new is old, scholar's searches find" by Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY, 14 June 2000, pg. 3D: Who first used the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics"? Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli in his posthumously published autobiography in 1924. The earliest reference Shapiro (That would be Fred Shapiro, some librarian in Yale Law School--ed.) could find came from an 1896 statistics journal that turned up in a search of JSTOR, a subscription Web site that indexes core scholarly journals. The Making of America database (Michigan) has NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, January 1867, pg. 241, "Nothing lies like figures." The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November 1892, pg. 379: It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." I have an 1880s hit somewhere at home, but didn't post it because I thought Mark Twain had it earlier. -------------------------------------------------------- LAND FOR PEACE A friend of mine saw a cartoon in which an old American Indian approaches the Israeli prime minister and says, with some irony: "Land for peace!" The friend asked me about the phrase. Literature Online has John Weever, THE WHIPPING OF THE SATYRE (poem, 1601): Which spite of spites, Still like Mount Sion stands, In gowned peace clapping her happy hands. No land for peace, no peace for happinesse... John Banks, THE UNHAPPY FAVOURITE (play, 1682): ..and Cowards That sell the Land for Peace and Childrens Portions... From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:56:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:56:51 EDT Subject: Fred Shapiro on NPR Message-ID: A librarian at the NYPL just told me that he heard Fred Shapiro on NPR today (Saturday) talking about the "computer bug" and "software." Check the NPR website (www.npr.org I think). From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 5 16:27:26 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 09:27:26 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: larry horn: I seem to recall at least one additional parameter that emerged in our earlier discussion of these: their prevalence after (orthographic-)vowel-final nouns, as well as (or especially in) foreign imports. yes, indeed. i considered mentioning this, but didn't because i thought we'd had a pretty extensive discussion on this topic a while back. certainly someone with my family name is sensitive to the issue. is my family the Zwickys? the Zwicky's? the Zwickies? (i opt for the first, but both the other versions are attested.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:17:37 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:17:37 -0400 Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace In-Reply-To: <200008051547.LAA09852@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November > 1892, pg. 379: > > It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of > veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." > > I have an 1880s hit somewhere at home, but didn't post it because I > thought Mark Twain had it earlier. Once again Barry's brilliant research has hit pay dirt! I would of course be interested in the details of the 1880s hit. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:24:37 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:24:37 -0700 Subject: common practices in descriptive "grammars" Message-ID: ron butters: I'm a little confused when linguists of the stature of Arnold Zwicky use--even if only as a kind of shorthand--terms such as "legitimate" to describe commonplace practices such as scare quotes, thereby consigning emphatic quotation marks to "illegitimacy." fair enough. "legitimate" was a poor choice of words, and it drew attention away from the main point i was trying to make in my original paragraph, which was that "scarequotes" denotes both form (quotation marks) and function (some sort of ironic distancing), so that "greengrocer's scarequotes" would be contradictory, given that "greengrocer's" denotes a different function (emphasis). part of the problem lies in the fact that this thread began with a discussion of departures from prescribed writing practice, so the implicit point of view was that of the norms for formal writing. in this context, emphatic quotation marks are literally illegitimate, that is, contrary to the rules. that fact was, however, beside the point in my posting. i was also in the process of shifting the point of view to that of linguistic description, where the rules are whatever principles people seem to be following in their speaking and writing. given that, it would have been better for me to have gone back and removed any allusions to standardness. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), hearing a little barbie voice saying, "writing is hard - let's go shopping!" From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:53:36 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 12:53:36 -0500 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) Message-ID: Almost, Herb. Yankton is across the Missouri in South Dakota. DMLance Herb Stahlke wrote: > Aaron, > > You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is > from Nebraska. > > As to the relationship between Canadian English and Standard Spoken > American English, you first have to narrow what you mean by Canadian > English. The Maritimes and Labrador and Newfoundland have some pretty > distinctive dialects, but if you go with southern Ontario you have some > that shares quite a lot with Inland Northern. In fact, my own Canadian > Raising, and I'm from south of Detroit, is pretty much like what you > hear across the Detroit River. Shifting between Ontario Canadian and > Inland Northern is not difficult. > > Herb Stahlke > > <<< aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK 8/ 5 7:25a >>> > >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer > > (...on Ehud Barak) > > This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I > forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" > English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? > Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. > > I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a > standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and > standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point > out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. > > Thanks, > > Aaron > > -- > ________________________________________________________________________ > Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh > http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and > aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics > > Bide lang and fa fair \\ // > \\// / > / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:52:26 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:52:26 -0400 Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace In-Reply-To: <200008051547.LAA09852@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November > 1892, pg. 379: > > It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of > veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." A slightly earlier version of this quotation appears in an article in The Economic Journal, June 1892, by Robert Giffen. At page 209 of this article we find: "An old jest runs to the effect that there are three degrees of comparison among liars. There are liars, there are outrageous liars, and there are scientific experts. This has lately been adapted to throw dirt upon statistics. There are three degrees of comparison, it is said, in lying. There are lies, there are outrageous lies, and there are statistics." Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 19:25:30 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 15:25:30 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: In a message dated 8/5/2000 12:37:55 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes: << is my family the Zwickys? the Zwicky's? the Zwickies? >> Arnold prefers ZWICKYS, but it seems to me that ZWICKIES is much more appropriate, given its resemblance to WHEATIES, the choice of champions, COOKIES, and other wonderful things. (What, though, is a WHEATY?) My family, unfortunately, will have to be the BUTTERSES, I guess, which looks like the name of a family of Celtic languages spoken by that very unfortunate character in William Boroughs novel, NAKED LUNCH. From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Sat Aug 5 19:27:32 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 20:27:32 +0100 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Aaron, > >You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is >from Nebraska. Ooops. Tells you how often I watch(ed) NBC. > > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any >> other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? > >And Robert MacNeil. From PBS? Thanks! --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Sat Aug 5 19:24:38 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 14:24:38 -0500 Subject: theme song lyrics Message-ID: Does anyone know where I can find the lyrics to old children's radio shows, specifically "Little Orphan Annie" and "Jack Armstrong" or does anyone know of a listserv ? Bob Wachal From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 19:34:54 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 15:34:54 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in any case hasn't the weird connotations)? From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 20:40:24 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 16:40:24 -0400 Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I went to a couple grammars to check myself, and I find that an orphan quote is simply any that is not properly attributed. To be more specific, a quote that is not properly introduced. So it's not the same as a "scare quote," but it is. Hmm, "scare" is perhaps a better name for these specific orphan quotes, but I suppose that I just enjoy using orphan quote since I learned it so early. Perhaps it's time to change a paradigm. I'll have to find my brain-jack. bob again > From: Bob Haas > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:23:25 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes > > When I was in journalism school at UNC, I learned the term orphan quotes, > which referred as I remember it, to those quote marks thrown in for > emphasis. A little bit of spice, I suppose, and orphaned because the > material within came not from an actual quote. I suppose that they are > free-floating quotes, which writers can reach up and pull from the air in > order to pepper their writing with emphasis and excitement. Is anybody > familiar with the term? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 23:18:32 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 19:18:32 EDT Subject: theme song lyrics Message-ID: The Museum of Broadcasting (or is it the Museum of Television and Radio?) has one branch in Manhattan and one in California. As I've said before, I've rarely found it helpful. You'll have to plan an all-day outing to hear "yadda, yadda, yadda"--if they have that. However, I'm sure the Museum has the audio of radio theme song lyrics. John Javna wrote a book about tv theme songs which I have, and it has stuff like Brady lyrics and lost Star Trek lyrics. He didn't do radio shows. The Museum has a small, generally unhelpful research staff, but you can contact them and ask anyway. 25 West 52nd Street New York, NY 10019 (212) 621-6600 http://www.mtr.org From maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Sat Aug 5 23:55:19 2000 From: maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (A. Maberry) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 16:55:19 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008051310.IAA08755@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Natalie Maynor wrote: > > I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently > during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying > whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that > that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) I don't. I say either I'm going "to the store" or "to the grocery store" but never "to the supermarket". However, I hear it from time to time. Allen maberry at u.washington.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sun Aug 6 01:03:01 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 18:03:01 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: ron butters: My family, unfortunately, will have to be the BUTTERSES, I guess... i'm sorry. this is irretrievably silly, and a bit naughty as well. maybe your family could be the SPREADS. or the CAPRICORNS. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 01:17:01 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:17:01 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" & Martinez/Martini Message-ID: I always thought that the change from Martinez to Martini was good, especially if you're having more than one. Martinez's? Martinezes? No! Martinis! Now, where is that damned statistics citation... From pds at VISI.COM Sun Aug 6 01:27:36 2000 From: pds at VISI.COM (Tom Kysilko) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 20:27:36 -0500 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the opposite side of the fold. Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife remembers it as a "cootie catcher". I can find neither "cootie catcher" nor "cooty catcher" in: DARE RHDAS RHWUD MWNID3 Chapman Wentworth and Flexner Ayto and Simpson Watts although they all have references to real and/or fanciful body vermin. Cootie catchers were mentioned on this list in 1993 in connection with a thread on Cooties. The term seems to be alive and well. AltaVista just gave me 1000+ hits for "cootie catcher", including instructions for making one (below, sans diagrams), and 2 hits for "cooty catcher", including the transcript of Terry Nichols' trial (also below). Are these things known by any other names? And what is their connection with cooties? ============================= http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/oklahoma/nichtranscripts/010298am.html Marife Nichols - Direct MR. TIGAR: Let me do it this way to save time. We offer M301, M303, M304, M306, M308, M309, and that's it, your Honor. MR. RYAN: No objection to any of those, your Honor. THE COURT: All right. They are received. BY MR. TIGAR: Q. Mrs. Nichols, could you just leaf through those and just tell the jury briefly what each one of them is. A. M301, it's a card for me that Terry made -- made. It's -- a welcome-back card. When I went to Philippines. Q. And is it made in the same way as the other ones? A. Yes. Q. Okay. All right. The next one. A. M303. He made a card for Nicole, "Daddy's little angel." M304, he made me a card. I think this is a Valentine's card. It says he loves me. M306, he made a -- what do you call it? Kootchie -- I don't know -- how do you call it in English? Q. A cooty-catcher? A. A cooty-catcher. Q. Is that folded paper with numbers on it for kids to use? A. Yes. ====================== http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/arthur/prunella/cootie/index.html 1. Start with a rectangular sheet of paper. Fold the bottom of the paper to the side of the page, to make a triangle. 2. Then cut off the flap above the triangle. 3. Now open the triangle and you'll have a square. 4. Fold one corner to the other corner diagonally. 5. Open paper. 6. Fold corners toward center of the paper 7. When all 4 corners are folded, your paper will look like this. 8. Flip your paper over so the folded sides are face down. 9. Again, fold corners toward center diagonally. 10. When all 4 corners are folded, your paper will look like this. 11. On the same side, write the numbers 1 through 8, putting one number in each triangle. 12. Hold the paper in front of you like a square. Fold it in half vertically and pen it back up again. 13. Then fold the square in half horizontally and open it back up again. Make sure that the numbers you've written are facing you. 14. Open each flap and write a fortune on each triangle inside. When your fortunes are written, close all the flaps. 15. Flip the paper over and color each square with a different color. 16. Flip the paper over again so that the numbers are face up. Fold the square in half, either horizontally or vertically. Slide your thumbs and fingers under the four flaps. 17. Finally, rotate your hands, bringing your thumbs and index fingers together. The cootie catcher should expand. The numbered triangles will disappear inside, like the middle of a flower when the petals close. Then open and play! ====================== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sun Aug 6 01:38:10 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:38:10 -0400 Subject: apostrophes & grocers Message-ID: The discussion of apostrophes has led me to rethink my lifelong asumption that the little lawn signs --or similar postings-- that people put on their property reading, e.g., "The Hill's" were establishing ownership, that is, were irregularly (my polite evasion of the objectionable "illigitimate[ly]") -written possessives. They always made me think of the Scottish usage for the head of the clan, as in "The Campbell." Now I must suppose they were really meant to convey the plural. On the question of the American equivalent of "greengrocer," I associate the word /market/ with produce, and I think that insofar as there were separate establishments for fruits & vegs, they were called "vegetable markets" and "fruit markets" and the proprietors were similarly, fruit & vegetable men. There was a "fruit and vegetable man" who drove an open, canopy-covered, horse-drawn wagon into our neighborhood every few weeks in summer during the 30's in Lincoln, Nebraska. While the place where we shop is undoubtedly a "supermarket"-- selling everything from motor oil to playing cards, as well as groceries, produce, meat & fish, beer & soda -- we call it the "store," and what we buy there are simply "grocs" (pronounced "grocks"). A. Murie From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Sun Aug 6 01:52:47 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:52:47 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: At 8:27 PM -0500 8/5/2000, Tom Kysilko wrote, ostensibly about cootie catcher: >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an >option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the >device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is >repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the >opposite side of the fold. > >Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife >remembers it as a "cootie catcher". Me too, now that you mention it... > >Are these things known by any other names? And what is their connection >with cooties? Well, when I was in elementary school, I had no idea that cooties weren't imaginary. Of course, we'd accuse other kids of *having* them, even so. I remember vaguely using the cootie catchers to nip at other kids' arms. -- Alice Faber tel. (203) 865-6163 Haskins Laboratories fax (203) 865-8963 270 Crown St new improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu From johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU Sun Aug 6 02:20:22 2000 From: johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Johanna N Franklin) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:20:22 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: I remember (from about 10-12 years ago) "cootie catcher" being common, but I also remember "fortune teller." Johanna Excerpts from mail: 5-Aug-100 cootie catcher by Tom Kysilko at VISI.COM > I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school > kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an > option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the > device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is > repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the > opposite side of the fold. > > Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife > remembers it as a "cootie catcher". From bkane at TIGGER.JVNC.NET Sun Aug 6 03:01:57 2000 From: bkane at TIGGER.JVNC.NET (Bernard W. Kane) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 23:01:57 -0400 Subject: further to livid Message-ID: >From the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (Barnhart 1988) s.v., p. 604: livid _adj._ having a dull-bluish or grayish color. Probably before 1425 _livide,_ in a translation of Chauliac's _Grande Chirurgie,_ borrowed from Middle French _livide_ and Latin _lividus,_ from _livere_ be bluish. Latin _livere_ (formed from a lost adjective *livos, Indo-European _*liwos, Pok. 965) is cognate with Old Irish _li_ color, Welsh _lliw,_ Old Slavic _sliva_ plum {Ed.: ah, there, Slivovitz!] and Old English _sla, slah_ SLOE. The modern extended use of angry, as if livid with rage, is first recorded in 1912. The hit from 1425 is probably a contribution of one of Sol Steinmetz's collection of Middle English specialists who worked on the book. Bernie Kane word-finder mailto:bkane at tigger.jvnc.net From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Sat Aug 5 04:38:34 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 21:38:34 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Net verifies both names: http://www.3w-zeitschriften.de/ElliottSteven/ElliottSteven0811821374.htm http://www.funorama.com/ Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com > -----Original Message----- > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf > Of Johanna N Franklin > > I remember (from about 10-12 years ago) "cootie catcher" being > common, but I also remember "fortune teller." > > Johanna From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 06:18:34 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:18:34 EDT Subject: Billy Goats; Hush Puppies; Snicker Doodle; Dutch Nanies; Romeo & Juliet Message-ID: More food. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BILLY GOATS _billy-goat date cake._ A cookie made with dates and nuts. As noted by Betty Fussell in _I Hear America Cooking_ (1986), it is specific to the Pacific states after the Deglet Noor date was introduced from Arabia into the Coachella Valley in California in 1890. The reason for the cookie's name is not known. --John Mariani, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999). From AMERICAN COOKERY, June/July 1939, pg. 25: THIRD PRIZE (American Prize Cookies. "Lime Snaps" and "Bleeding Hearts" placed ahead--ed.) Elsie Loy Benney, Kansas OLD-FASHIONED "BILLY GOATS" 3/4 cup butter 1 1/2 cups light brown sugar 3 eggs, beaten 1 cup nut meats, chopped 1/2 pound raisins or chopped dates 4 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon soda 2 tablespoons buttermilk Cream the butter and the sugar together and add the beaten eggs. Stir in the nut meats, the raisins or dates and the vanilla. Sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon and cloves, and add alternately with the soda dissolved in the buttermilk. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan and bake about twenty minutes in a moderate oven. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HUSH PUPPIES (continued) As I've said, I've finally located the "hush puppy" point of origin to Tallahassee, Florida. From AMERICAN COOKERY, June/July 1940, pg. 40, col. 2: QUERY No. 6214.--"Can you possibly tell me what 'hush puppies' are and how the name originated?" _"Hush Puppies"_ The "Cricket Tea Room Cook Book" answers the question as follows: 3 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 tablespoon melted shortening 1 1/2 cups milk Cornmeal to make stiff batter Beat the eggs and add to the liquid; add remaining ingredients and drop from a spoon into the deep, but not too hot, for used in frying the fish. They are delicious with fish. The story of the origin of hush puppies is: In a camp near Thomasville, Georgia, where fishermen and hunters congregate, the negro cook made this bread. While the men were eating, and to pacify the hungrry dogs, they would throw pieces of bread to them with this admonition: "Hush, puppies." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SNICKER DOODLE (continued) From the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 September 1919, pg. 22, col. 3: SNICKER DOODLE One cup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 cup of milk, 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 2 unbeaten eggs added last; put in flat pie tins and spread with cinnamon and sugar. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DUTCH NANIES From AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1941, pg. 613, col. 2: QUERY No. 6340.--"I am enclosing some recipes you asked for in your February issue." WIth thanks to Mr. M. L., of Washington, we include these recipes which he quotes from "The United States Regional Cook Book," edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. _Dutch Nanies_ 4 eggs 1/2 cup sifted flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter, softened Confectioners' sugar Lemon juice Beat the eggs thoroughly, sift the flour and salt together, add alternately with the milk, a little at a time, beating until the batter is smooth. Spread butter over the bottom and sides of an unheated ten-inch frying pan. Pour the batter into the frying pan and set in a hot oven at 400 deg. Fah. Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, reducing the heat gradually to moderate (350 deg. Fah.) during baking. The pancake should puff up at the sides and be crisp and brown. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar (powdered sugar) and lemon juice. If you wish, you can put sliced banana on also. Then roll up like an omlet. Serve on a hot platter. _Note:_ The words "Dutch Nanies" come from the name Dutch Banana Pancakes. "Nanies" is a corruption of the word bananas. That's "Dutch Nanies"? I was thinking back to my days in Amsterdam and the question "Who's your Nanny?", but no... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ROMEO AND JULIET From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 December 1900, pg. 21, col. 1: ...A French scholar, suggested the following: MENU. Capitolade de boeuf sali aux pommes de terres. Jambonneau et haricots blancs, sauce Worcestershire. Fonceurs au beurre d'Armour et Cie. Pouding d'amidon. Cafe au lait. which was bawled out by the vulgar waiter thus: "Brown de hash, ham and----nine up, draw three, three Romeo and Juliets." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WIGGLE From AMERICAN COOKERY, August/September 1918, "Camp Cookery," pg. 97, col. 1: A group of dishes, we call inclusively if not accurately, "Wiggles"; meaning by that, any mixture served hot on crackers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- CANDY BUTCHER; HOT SODA (continued) Some earlier hits for these terms. "Trials of a Candy Butcher" is in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 January 1900, pg. 28, col. 3. "How to run a hot soda apparatus profitably" is in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 February 1900, pg. 39, col. 1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM This has gotta go in the OED. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream would not exist without this classic first. From AMERICAN COOKERY, "Tested Recipes of the Month," January 1943, pg. 213, col. 1: _CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM_ 2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk 1/2 cup water 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 7-ounce package semi-sweet chocolate, chipped 1 cup cream Mix milk, water, vanilla and chocolate; chill. Whip cream to consistency of soft custard; fold into chilled mixture. Freeze in refrigerator tray until half frozen. Scrape and beat until smooth but not melted. Replace in freezing unit until frozen. Serves 6. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 06:18:43 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:18:43 EDT Subject: GOP; Windy City; Bucket Shop; Stand Pat; Foot and Mouth; Weinerwurst; Hoochenoo Message-ID: I've looked through some of my papers and have rounded up every unposted item BUT "lies & statistics." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- G.O.P., G.O.M. & G.O.W. (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 August 1885, pg. 2, col. 2: MR. GLADSTONE is down with a throat disease. The g.o.m. cannot last much longer unless he gives the g.o.p. the slip, takes the advice of the g.o.w., his wife, and throws his night-key away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WINDY CITY (continued) This is totally useless! No one in Chicago will listen to anything I say! From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 10 October 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE Chicago _News_ has a four-column paragraph on the wickedness of that city, the sum and substance of which is that it is a more sinful city than Babylon. When a Windy City scribe starts out to knock out the Biblical writers, he stops at nothing. From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 17 October 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE League championship colors fly never so proudly as in CHicago. It is natural for the Windy City to be "the tenant of the pennant," as a Chicago Vassar girl would express it. Why a Chicago girl should use sesquipedalian words her detractors must explain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BUCKET SHOP (continued) From the DETROIT EVENING JOURNAL, 5 May 1885, pg. 3, col. 3: ORIGIN OF "BUCKET SHOPS" The Three-Cornered Fight to be Soon Adjusted. (...) "By the way, how did bucket shops originate?" "A man in Chicago who had dealt considerably on the board went to a broker one day and wanted to be allowed to take a deal of 1,000 bushels of wheat. The broker couldn't possibly do it, and the man asked him to go into a 5,000 bushel deal, letting him take 1,000 bushels of it. Th commission man finally turned to his would-be customer and said: 'If you want to deal by the bucketful go down into one of those open shops.' But the name has lost its significance because the board of trade in Chicago allows trades of 1,000 bushels of wheat or 50 barrels of pork. It used to be nothing less than 5,000 bushels of wheat or 250 barrels of pork. None of the bucket shops, except some of the little ones, will permit transactions any smaller than those of the board." (...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- STAND PAT (continued) From the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 7 July 1885, pg. 4, col. 6: "STAND pat and bet high" is Gambler Truman's rule when he has a poor poker hand. Carter Harrison's appointments show that he can stand Pat to quite an unlimited extent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 18 April 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE "foot and mouth" disease is epidemic in Washington. After considerable breaking out in the mouth, chinning for an appointment, the victim has to foot it back home for lack of car fare. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WEINERWURST (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 20 March 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: WEINERWURST sausage is being imported from London. The hydrophobic scare has caused the slaughter of 10,000 dogs in the metropolis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HOOCHENOO See DARE, which has an 1877 citation with a different spelling. From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 6 March 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: GOV. SWINEFORD, of Alaska, takes a hand in editing a newspaper of Sitka. The copy at hand declares "The Hoochenoo must go." At this distance it is difficult to make out what "the Hoochenoo" is, but presumably it is a slaughter-house democrat or a crooked city marshal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- STEALING COPPERS OFF A DEAD NIGGER'S EYES From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 3 April 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: TALK about "stealing coppers off a dead nigger's eyes!" A Cleveland (O.) undertaker has been convicted of stealing one of the eyes of a corpse. An Ohio man would steal an open grave. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SLUMMING (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 March 1884, "SEEING THE SLUMS," illustration caption: THE NEWEST WRINKLE OF METROPOLITAN SOCIETY--HOW FASHION FINISHES THE NIGHT AFTER THE OPERA AND THE BALL AND ENJOYS A NOVEL SENSATION AT THE EXPENSE OF MISERY AND VICE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DRAMA From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 9 May 1885, pg. 3, col. 3: In Boston it is called the "drawmah;" in New York, "drahma;" in Philadelphia, "drama;" in Chicago, "drammer," but in St. Louis they talk about the "draymy." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DIVA From the NEW YORK DISPATCH, 26 April 1885, pg. 4, col. 5: THE reason they call the great singers "divas" is because they know how to dive into the pockets of the public and get along swimmingly on the high C's. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MONEY TALKS (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 December 1883, pg. 3, col. 1: JAKE MILLER isn't booming quite so much as he was. Frank Evans has had to drop his "SIlent Man" out of his repertoire. "Money talks," says Evans, "and Miller's piece doesn't. That's why. Sabe?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- O. K. (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 22 February 1883, pg. 2, col. 4: "MOTHER," said a slangy Cass avenue boy at the table, when company was present, "this butter is O. K., but the bread is N. G., and ought to get the G. B." "Just hear him!" exclaimed the fond mother; "he is such a beautiful Latin scholar that I don't pretend to understand a word he says!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- "NO CHECKEE, NO SHIRTEE!" (continued) "No Checkee, No Shirtee!" is the headline for a story in the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 October 1897, pg. 25, col. 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- RUSH THE GROWLER (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 19 January 1884, pg. 3, col. 4: The choicest beer of the celebrated Bechtel brand (brewage of 1883), ran like water, and every time the grand old beaker of Lemege faience ($1.99 at Ridleys), gave out, the venerable "growler" (as it was playfully entitled by some of the more volatile young Israelites present) was immediately borne to the nearest saloon, where, with a princely disregard of cost, it was quickly replenished with another quart of the amber fluid. "WORKING THE GROWLER" is the illustration caption and title of a story in the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 26 April 1884, pg. 12, cols. 1-4. From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 6 08:55:24 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 01:55:24 -0700 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >...In >the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 6 08:55:24 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 01:55:24 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the 50s. RIma From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Aug 6 10:39:36 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 06:39:36 -0400 Subject: Dutch Nanies = Baby? Message-ID: I've made a recipe very similar to what Barry has given, but the product of it is called a "Dutch baby". I believe it is in the new ed. of the Joy of Cooking. I was curious about the origin then, more so now. Frank Abate From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Sun Aug 6 12:59:10 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:59:10 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: Rima wrote: >>>I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade >school >>>kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) >>Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the >>term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in >>particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the >>50s. The fortune-tellers I do not recall from my youth. My eight-year old is fond of making them. My wife and I remember the folde paper (beak-like) device as a cootie catcher. My memory of cootie catchers is from the early '50's. They were aimed at another's head as much as the arm. Perhaps the fortune-teller is the PC version of a cootie catcher. I haven't found any dictionary evidence of coctie catcher. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 6 12:09:08 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 07:09:08 -0500 Subject: Putin In-Reply-To: <28.8f1b37e.26bdc65e@aol.com> Message-ID: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? I've been quietly horrified at this pronunciation. I'm not about to complain about the extra vowel stuck out front on Mbeki, or the stress on the second syllable on Helsinki, but what could possibly be so overwhelmingly difficult about pronouncing an actual vowel in the second syllable in Putin? Surely that wouldn't violate any phonotactic constraint in English. This reaction isn't just prescriptive tsk-tsk-ing. Some time ago (before Putin was in the news) I saw an episode of Frasier in which one disreputable character addressed another with the endearment "pootn'", exactly the way Putin is now pronounced, and the laugh track came on. What kinds of connotations will trickle through popular culture when a world leader's name sounds like that? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Sun Aug 6 12:51:17 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:51:17 -0400 Subject: Putin Message-ID: One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. gravy." There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an old fart. RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's™ Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 A unique dictionary that shows idiomatic and typical usage Trade paperback, 5¼" x 8¼", 1,300 pp., $7.99 / Cdn$11.95 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 Order from: utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM Sun Aug 6 14:31:11 2000 From: storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM (storkrn) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 07:31:11 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: original message: > >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school > >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) > > > Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the > term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in > particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the > 50s. > > RIma In central Connecticut in the 1950's I never heard of cootie catcher but I did hear of "flippers" as in: "If you children don't put those flippers away you will stay in during recess!" Sharyn Hay From RonButters at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 16:44:37 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 12:44:37 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: Valid point, Tom, about POUTINE; maybe the fact that there are so many Canadians reading the news in the US makes POUTINE more influential on them than on the ordinary speaker of USA English (note that I carefully avoided reference to the native speaker). though (as you imply). That makes this a little like the choice between Urinous and Youranus. Still, I'm sure that Poutin would rather be associated with food than flatulence. As for the "normal" English stress, well, yes, there certainly is that tendency (though as we all know, English stress placement is notoriously complex)--and I am reminded now that LENIN and STALIN are both normally pronounced in American English with a schwa in the second syullable. Maybe that is the model. But doesn't semantics override phonetics in situations like this? In a message dated 8/6/2000 8:42:14 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: << One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. gravy." There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an old fart. >> From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sun Aug 6 18:20:49 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 13:20:49 -0500 Subject: Putin Message-ID: Obviously semantics does not override phonetics here. Ron, your observation speaks to generative models of speech production. The native (Germanic) stress rules for English place the stress on the first syllable when the second (and last) one is weak. The alternative pronunciation "PYU-t'n" doesn't seem to be available in American phonology nowadays. What do the British do with this name? Aside from unsavory semantics, this name raises some interesting questions for phonological theory. DMLance RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > .......--and I am reminded now that LENIN and STALIN are both normally > pronounced in American English with a schwa in the second syullable. Maybe > that is the model. But doesn't semantics override phonetics in situations > like this? > > In a message dated 8/6/2000 8:42:14 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: > > << One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the > > pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, > > means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. > gravy." > > There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first > > syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an > old > > fart. >> From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sun Aug 6 18:36:00 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 13:36:00 -0500 Subject: Formality in Lexico-Syntax Message-ID: In an e-mail to someone I know fairly well, I first wrote (a) and then decided to change 'bill' to 'invoice' because that's what will appear at the top of the document in question. When I did so, I felt compelled to add the "dative 'to'." I'm sure I could omit the 'to' in both (a) and (b) in conversation and could omit it in writing (a) but not in writing (b). (I'm doing the paperwork for the annual conference of the Council of Geographic Names Authorities.) (a) I'm preparing a bill to send you. (b) I'm preparing an invoice to send to you. Comments on your own behavior in the regard? DMLance From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 6 19:23:05 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 14:23:05 -0500 Subject: Putin Message-ID: Mai, You raise the more general question of what the phonesthetics of a word has to do with its meaning. We all know of obvious cases, like "teeny" and "humongous" and the role of ideophonic reduplication in name-calling, but your comment raises the cross-linguistic question of the phonesthetics of a name as pronounced in another language and the potential political implications of that. I suspect these are very much nonce phenomena, but they can have considerable impact. Herb <<< mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU 8/ 6 7:13a >>> > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? I've been quietly horrified at this pronunciation. I'm not about to complain about the extra vowel stuck out front on Mbeki, or the stress on the second syllable on Helsinki, but what could possibly be so overwhelmingly difficult about pronouncing an actual vowel in the second syllable in Putin? Surely that wouldn't violate any phonotactic constraint in English. This reaction isn't just prescriptive tsk-tsk-ing. Some time ago (before Putin was in the news) I saw an episode of Frasier in which one disreputable character addressed another with the endearment "pootn'", exactly the way Putin is now pronounced, and the laugh track came on. What kinds of connotations will trickle through popular culture when a world leader's name sounds like that? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 6 09:24:42 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 17:24:42 +0800 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <001801bfffb2$f8d603a0$66e1183f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 7:31 AM -0700 8/6/00, storkrn wrote: >original message: > >> >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >> >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) >> >> >> Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the >> term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in >> particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the >> 50s. >> >> RIma > >In central Connecticut in the 1950's I never heard of cootie catcher but I >did hear of "flippers" as in: "If you children don't put those flippers away >you will stay in during recess!" > >Sharyn Hay Well, here and now in southern Connecticut, my daughter (now 15) spontaneously gave just "fortune tellers" for these grand school devices, but when prodded to come up with another name that other people used, did offer cootie catcher, so it's still around and evidently spreading a bit. Larry From brewer at MAIL.TKU.EDU.TW Sun Aug 6 23:37:24 2000 From: brewer at MAIL.TKU.EDU.TW (Warren Brewer) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 07:37:24 +0800 Subject: Putin Message-ID: > ... "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) ... "a dish of french fries ..." Actually, the spelling _putin_ reminds me of French _putain_ 'whore'; so let's call him _poon-tang_ and let Bill bang his brains out. -----Warren Brewer. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 00:50:07 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 20:50:07 -0400 Subject: First Published Use of "Internet" Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, susan wrote: > Can anyone tell me when and in what context and the word Internet was > first used? Thank you, Susan Gilbert mssmith at boone.net Here's still earlier information. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert Kahn are said to have used the term "Internet" in their paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," IEEE Transactiions on Communication Vol. Com-22, No. 5 (May 1974). Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Aug 7 05:42:22 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 22:42:22 -0700 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <200008070400.VAA19540@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had been successful. Rudy From rkm at SLIP.NET Mon Aug 7 06:25:36 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 23:25:36 -0700 Subject: Putin Message-ID: As a pronunciation editor, I would put in the dictionary the pronunciation of someone's name the way that person pronounced it. This is assuming that this is possible in English. Sometimes, however, foreign names used often enough do indeed get Anglicized. Think of Martina Navratilova. Rima From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:36:43 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:36:43 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041442.KAA15764@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", > is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. For what it's "worth," I always considered those to be scarequotes, although fresh "produce" would have been a better example than "fresh" produce --- Steve K. From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:49:12 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:49:12 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > Here, we don't have the reversal-of-intention indicated by scare quotes. > The quote marks are just used as a kind of underscoring. I think we did > talk about these once before here and called them 'emphatic quotes' or > some such thing, but they don't seem to have an established name. OK, Lynne and Larry have convinced me that they're a separate phenomenon, although I think I've heard scarequotes used for both the wink-wink nudge-nudge sense and the "emphasis" sense, maybe because of the lexical gap. --- Steve K. From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:52:45 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:52:45 -0400 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Well, it will be fun to tell my Intro to Linguistics class next semester > about how even someone as brilliant and experienced as I am can walk around > for years with a slightly idiosyncratic definition in his head for a term of > art in his own profession and not notice that he was marching to a different > flautist. Well, it's not idiosyncratic. I'm in your camp, it would seem. I apologize for not reading everything first and then commenting! --- Steve K. From johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU Mon Aug 7 14:05:28 2000 From: johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Johanna N Franklin) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:05:28 -0400 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased with time, or was my school an anomaly? Johanna Excerpts from mail: 6-Aug-100 Cootie catcher by Rudolph C Troike at U.ARIZO > Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can > verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early > to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, > in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had > small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had > been successful. > > Rudy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Combination of the Discoveries of Einstein and Pythagoras: E = m c^2 = m(a^2 + b^2) From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 14:08:33 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:08:33 -0400 Subject: Putin In-Reply-To: <28.8f1b37e.26bdc65e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 14:10:54 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:10:54 EDT Subject: Love Boat; Gorgy; Mary Jane; 50 Chowders Message-ID: LOVE BOAT The Monday, 7 August 2000 NEW YORK POST has a page three story about The Canaveral Star (Cape Canaveral, Florida), described by some as "the world's first floating bordello." The owner insists that "there is no sex"--just lap dances at sea. However, people seem to leave the VIP room happy. It's been called the "Love Boat." Also, the "Bordello Boat" and the "Stripper Ship." (Too bad the newspapers can't print a pun on "Titanic.") How about "Ship of Fools"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- GORGY Catholic League President William Donohue has called Al Gore's fundraiser at the L.A. Playboy mansion a "Gorgy." (NY POST, 7 August 2000, pg. 21, col. 1.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MARY JANE Did OED revise its "Mary Jane" entry? The earliest "Mary Jane"="marijuana" is from 1928. It's noted that "Mary Jane" was the name of slippers (from 1921). Did the popularity of the name "Mary Jane" come from elsewhere? The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, January 1919, pg. 16, has an ad for the "penny specialties" of Charles N. Miller Co., Beverly and Traverse Streets, Boston, Mass. "Dearos" and "Mary Janes" were "Re. U.S. Pat. Off." The "Mary Jane" ads were in most every issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- 50 CHOWDERS: ONE-POT MEALS--CLAM, CORN & BEYOND by Jasper White Scribner, NY 256 pages, hardcover, $30 2000 "Chapter 1: The Folklore and History of Chowder" is on pages 19-26. The timeline ends with: "2000 _50 Chowders_, by Jasper White, the first hardcover book of contemporary chowders, is published." Obviously, an important moment in recorded chowder history. There's not much new. "1894" includes a brief mention of Charles Ranhofer's THE EPICUREAN (the author states, without looking at other 1890s sources, that this may have been the birth of Manhattan Clam Chowder--in the recipe if not in the name), "1896" mentions Fannie Farmer's BOSTON COOKING SCHOOL COOKBOOK, and the next entry is a paragraph for "1900-1950." And that's not a great paragraph, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- PERSONAL (THERE'S A FJORD IN MY FUTURE) From Tuesday, August 8--Sunday, August 27, I'll be in Norway and Sweden. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:08:07 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:08:07 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At this point the Muse compels (not "*Compbells") me to insert the following. Although the tune is probably unfamiliar to you, the verse is appropriate. -- Mark A. Mandel FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html ================================= Editors' Waltz Words (c) Mark A. Mandel 2000 ttto [i.e., to the tune of] "Witnesses' Waltz" (Leslie Fish) (NOTES: 1. The last line of the chorus changes each time. 2. In the last line of v.4, the stresses can be misleading, so I've marked a couple of them with a backtick (`) before the stressed syllable.) ---------- CHORUS: Twelve thousand, half million, million and more, Misplaced apostrophe's, commas, galore, Spelling misteaks run-on sentences too * You'd think we could find something better to do. Come on, Elizabeth, William and Ted, Grab your green eyeshades and pencils of red. We'll go for a stroll and we'll exercise... pique At what people do to the language they speak. [Chorus, ending with...] * The stories you'll hear are essentially true. The signs in the market are rather a mess, Selling _apple's_ and _pear's_ with apostrophe-"S". And saying their flounder is _quote, fresh, unquote_ Suggests it's just two or three weeks off the boat. * It's ignorance makes them behave as they do. Computer typesetting is ever so fine For breaking long words that run over the line. But here in the paper, I'm sorry to tell, It hyphenates "moonglow" between "G" and "L".** * Computers can be mighty ignorant, too. Next we'll drop in on a woman I know Whose data was wrecked, a day's work at one blow. A technical writer bears part of the blame Who `thought "substi`tute" and "replace" mean the same. * Let's hope it won't happen to me or to you. Some say we're nitpickers, pedants, and worse, That care for precision in writing's perverse. But tell me, would you want your car's brakes repaired >From manuals not written by people who cared? * Your life could depend on the work that we do! ---------- ** NY Times, Mar. 7, 2000, p. A20, col. 2, 2nd paragraph from the bottom From jessie at SIRSI.COM Mon Aug 7 15:56:39 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:56:39 -0500 Subject: Fortune Teller (was Cootie catcher) Message-ID: The device, if we are talking about the same thing, in the '70s in North Alabama was also "fortune teller" and had nothing to do with catching cooties. A very intricate series of physical descriptions and professions (for the potential mate--a very sexist game) was written on the segments of the fortune teller, and you chose numbers (written on the outer segments) to determine what segment you landed on. Jessie Emerson --- Johanna wrote: >Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased with time, or was my school an anomaly? From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:54:53 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:54:53 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: In and around NYC in the fifties & sixties I heard only "fortune teller". Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:13:03 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:13:03 -0400 Subject: usenet asterisks (was "greengrocer's apostrophe") Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky writes: >>>>> for a while i was collecting examples from student papers in linguistics courses at ohio state, but they were just *too* frequent [note "usenet asterisks" for emphasis] for me to cope with. <<<<< Not just usenet (aka newsgroups if I understand correctly), but in email and elsewhere. Since the only formatting that is safely transmissible on the Internet is whatever can be expressed in plain ASCII, and the use of ALL CAPS is associated with shouting, *asterisks* or _underscores_ are often substituted for italicization or underlining. Speaking of capitals, Arnold, may I ask why you habitually eschew them? -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:58:23 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:58:23 -0400 Subject: cross-threaded Message-ID: arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), hearing a little barbie voice saying, "writing is hard - let's go shopping!" =========== At the mall, not the store. -- Mark From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:11:17 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:11:17 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: << Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. --- Steve K. >> Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:13:34 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:13:34 EDT Subject: one more thing about apostrphes Message-ID: I keep getting a spam that has in the subject line: BRITNEY SPEARS [sic] BREASTS! These folks clearly never met a greengrocer! From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:12:38 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:12:38 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: >In and around NYC in the fifties & sixties I heard only "fortune teller". In Westchester (northern NY suburbs) in the early-mid 60s, I'm pretty sure we used both. The town I grew up in was approximately 1/3 natives, 1/3 folks who'd moved out to the suburbs from NYC, and 1/3 in-migrants from the midwest. I remember being conscious of the resulting dialect mélange (pop vs soda, what's the vowel in the first syllable of coffee and chocolate, etc) from an early age, so it's possible that "fortune teller" was the native/local term and "cootie catcher" an import, but I honestly don't know. As I posted elsewhere on this thread, we were very aware of metaphorical cooties but totally unaware that there was any real critter called cootie. I remember being shocked when (in high school, or perhaps even college!) I learned that cooties were lice. I don't even remember lice-checks (louse-checks?), though I suppose the school nurse must have done some kind of visual inspection. ============================================================================= Alice Faber new, improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu Haskins Laboratories old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 USA tel: (203) 865-6163 x258; fax (203) 865-8963 From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:19:51 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:19:51 EDT Subject: one moment at THE time Message-ID: If we have discussed this before, excuse me. My neighbor's car has a bumper sticker that says, "ONE MOMENT AT THE TIME"; for a while, I wasn't sure what this meant. After giving it some thought, I decided that it meant what I would express as 'one moment at A time'. I have heard--in the South--"one day at THE time" (as opposed to "one day at A time'), so I guess I should have been able to figure this out more quickly. One thing that stumped me was that (Unlike "He's still in THE bed" for "He's still in bed")? From katie at LING.LING.ROCHESTER.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:28:40 2000 From: katie at LING.LING.ROCHESTER.EDU (Katie Schack) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:28:40 -0400 Subject: Fortune Teller (was Cootie catcher) In-Reply-To: <00c301c00088$1301a100$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: In Southern Minnesota in the '80s, the term "cootie catcher" was used, although the actual use of the object was usually much more similar to telling fortunes than to catching cooties. I don't recall the term "fortune teller" ever being used to describe it. I'm wondering if there may have been another name as well, but if so I don't remember what it was. Katie On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Jessie Emerson wrote: > The device, if we are talking about the same thing, in the '70s in North > Alabama was also "fortune teller" and had nothing to do with catching > cooties. A very intricate series of physical descriptions and professions > (for the potential mate--a very sexist game) was written on the segments of > the fortune teller, and you chose numbers (written on the outer segments) to > determine what segment you landed on. > > Jessie Emerson > --- > Johanna wrote: > > >Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s > on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember > them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and > we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was > just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could > the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased > with time, or was my school an anomaly? > From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:29:37 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:29:37 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 2:28:08 AM, rkm at SLIP.NET writes: << Think of Martina Navratilova. >> and Dusty Yevksy From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 16:36:19 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:36:19 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <97.904507a.26c039a5@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: > > << Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to > POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, > our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself > down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. > > Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a > phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? Most dictionaries leave stressed long-vowel syllables open, so actually the first syllable would probably be shown as POO (with the macron or connector or whatever symbol is used to represent the oo of poo) and the t would be placed in the second syllable. I should have represented it above that way. --- Steve K. From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:45:39 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:45:39 -0700 Subject: usenet asterisks (was "greengrocer's apostrophe") Message-ID: mark mandel: Speaking of capitals, Arnold, may I ask why you habitually eschew them? some years ago i noticed that a colleague used lower case only and asked her why. she said that it significantly improved the speed and accuracy of her typing. i have an odd approach to typing (something i devised myself at age 8), involving two fingers on the right hand for all the ordinary keys, with one finger on the left hand reserved for the shift key (and now ctrl and alt as well). it turns out that sticking to lower case significantly improves *my* speed and accuracy. now it's just the way i do things in speed mode. (writing manuscripts is a much slower process, so upper case, emacs commands, etc. aren't a problem.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 05:32:02 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 13:32:02 +0800 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <97.904507a.26c039a5@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:11 PM -0400 8/7/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: > ><< Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to >POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, >our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself >down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. > > >--- Steve K. >> > >Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a >phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? well, the former is too un-American-sounding, and the latter is pre-empted by the term (possibly not yet attested) for a demonstration of dogs and dog-owners protesting rabid enforcement of leash laws. larry From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 18:09:35 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 14:09:35 EDT Subject: POOCH-IN/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 1:31:26 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? well, the former is too un-American-sounding, and the latter is pre-empted by the term (possibly not yet attested) for a demonstration of dogs and dog-owners protesting rabid enforcement of leash laws. larry >> hee-hee--but better dogs than methane! And of course POOCH-IN can't have a schwa in the second syllable, whereas PUTIN can--virtually must. I'm sure I've heard PUTIN pronounced with a glottal stop in the middle and a syllabic final /n/--totally indistinguishable from the the euphemism for farting.ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 7 19:23:35 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 14:23:35 -0500 Subject: What does this mean? Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1517 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:54:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:54:59 EDT Subject: Jim Crow Message-ID: Some "Jim Crow" items. From the NEW YORK DISPATCH, 16 August 1885, pg. 6, col. 2: _JIM CROW._ BY CHARLEY WHITE It has occasionally been staed in some country journals from, unknown authority, that there was an individual named George Nicholls, a clown, who it is said sang Jim Crow in Western circuses before the late T. D. Rice made that song so popular. This rumor no doubt originated with a few persons in the equestrian business about the time of Rice's debut and success--1829. It seems rather unkind now at this late day to rob so great an artist of his laurels. I take great pride in mentioning the above case merely in support of Rice, my old respected and much-loved friend. I was an ardent admirer of his professional ability, and believe he was original in most of his productions. It appears to me that aggrieved parties or others of that time certainly had opportunities and time enough during the many years of Rice's success, to denounce the claim of Rice, or any intention or trespass on his part. However, as this was all anterior to my entree in the ranks of minstrelsy, or of compiling any record of similar events, I must necessarily handle the subject carefully, and at the same time live in doubt for want of more satisfactory authority as to the truthfulness of the foregoing statements. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, September 1909, pg. 91, col. 1: JIM CROWS Ten pounds of chocolate coating Four pounds of lozenge sugar Three pounds of roasted and chopped almonds Seeds of one vanilla bean Put three pounds Valencia almonds into a peanut roaster and roast until slightly brown in color, then turn out and chop or break into small pieces. Now have ten pounds of No. 1 chocolate coating melted and turned out on a warm marble slab, add to the chocolate four pounds or enough lozenge sugar to stiffen the chocolate to a thick paste, then add the chopped almonds; mix well, and leave the paste set in a warm, dry room over night; then add the seeds of one vanilla bean, mix well. Now knead the batch until it is cool or will dry off bright and glossy. Roll the batch into small sticks and one-half inches long and as (Col. 2--ed.) thick as a lead pencil; lay each stick on glazed paper; set in ice box until dry and hard. If the goods are dull and gray, they have beeen worked too hot or too cold. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:55:08 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:55:08 EDT Subject: Philadelphia Ice Cream; Teddy Bear; Mexican Chocolate; College Ice Message-ID: PHILADELPHIA ICE CREAM Last Sunday's New York Times, Week-in-Review section, had a front-page photo of a box of Vanilla Ice Cream used to describe the Philadelphia Republican national convention. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1909, pg. 114, col. 1: While ice cream is made in Europe mostly with the addition of eggs, or what is called frozen custard or Neapolitan cream, most of the ice cream in this country is made with pure cream, or milk and cream only, and is called "Philadelphia Ice Cream." The question of the relative merits of "Neapolitan" and "Philadelphia" cream is principally one of taste. Those who are fond of eggs and custards will prefer the former, those who are partial to pure cream, as well as those with whom eggs do not agree, will choose the latter. (Pg. 115, col. 1--ed.) VANILLA ICE CREAM (PHILADELPHIA STYLE) Three quarts cream, one and one-half pounds sugar, vanilla. Dissolve sugar in cream, soak vanilla in cream for some hours, stir often, and freeze. Or else cook cream as directed, strain and freeze. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1910, pg. 94, col. 2: As we have stated in some previous articles, there are two distinct kinds of ice cream, viz., the "Philadelphia Ice Cream," which is made from pure cream and sugar, and the "Neapolitan Cream," which is generally made all over Europe. The first named cream is made throughout the country. Both are good; in fact, for puddings and different other frozen dishes, the Neapolitan cream is preferable on account of its smooth texture and rich color. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- TEDDY BEAR (continued) CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, August 1909, pg. 29, has an advertisement for a candy by Hawley & Hoops, New York: TEDDY (CHOCOLATE CANDY) BEARS 10 FOR 1 CENT THE WORDS "TEDDY" and "TEDDY BEARS" Registered in the U. S. Patent Office ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN CHOCOLATE (continued) CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "Hot Soda Recipes," December 1909, pg. 101, col. 1: _Chocolate Mexican._--The way they serve it in Mexico. One egg, one and one-half ounces chocolate syrup, one teaspoonful sweet cream, one-half teaspoonful cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful salt; shake well; strain in a cup; add one cupful of hot water. Top with a spoonful of whipped cream. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- COLLEGE ICE DARE cites DIALECT NOTES from 1913. "College ice" was another name for "sundae." This is from THE SODA FOUNTAIN, March 1906, pg. 30, col. 1: _College Ices._ (George)--A "college ice" is simply an ice cream over which has been poured a quantity of syrup, crushed fruit or fancy nut delicacies. The usual method of serving it is by first placing a cone shaped measure of ice cream in a flare champagne glass, then pouring over the ice cream the required flavor, the customer mixing it with the fruit as he eats it. Here are a few formulas from various sources: (1) Take the usual quantity of ice cream and pour over it a heavy chocolate syrup. Garnish with walnut halves, or a ladle of walnut russe. (2) Vanilla cream, New York Cream, in regular sundae cup; pour over ice cream. Port wine syrup, with grated nuts and top off with whipped cream and maraschino cherry. (3) Over a ladle of peach ice cream pour a sauce made of the following: One pound of mixed nuts chopped fine, mixed with 1 pint of rich maple syrup. (4) One dipper of ice cream, sliced orange cut in diamond shaped pieces, sliced pineapple cut in triangular shape, whole English walnuts, maraschino cherries. The nuts and fruits to be arranged artistically. No syrups used. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:55:18 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:55:18 EDT Subject: Danish Pastry (October 1921, AMERICAN COOKERY) Message-ID: DARE also cites Webster's 2nd (1934) for "Danish Pastry." Supposedly, the Danish baker of President Woodrow Wilson's birthday cake in 1917 also popularized "Danish pastry." I e-mailed Princeton University about any Woodrow Wilson scholar. No one responded yet. There's a WHITE HOUSE COOK BOOK, but it doesn't list all the White House chefs. The White House accepts e-mail, but doesn't really respond. (I last wrote to Hillary Clinton about the nickname of her home, "the Windy City," and got a meaningless, form letter response.) This is the "Danish Pastry" citation (there are pg. 198 two photos with the recipe: "DANISH PASTRY (SET TO RISE)" and "DANISH PASTRY (COOKED)") from AMERICAN COOKERY, October 1921, pg. 197, col. 1: _Danish Pastry_ Rinse a bowl and a wooden spoon in hot water, then in cold, letting cold water, changed once or twice, stand in the bowl (Col. 2--ed.) until the bowl is chilled. Then refill the bowl with cold water, and in it work 3/4 a cup of butter, with the spoon, until the butter is pliable and waxy throughout. Then pat it into two thin cakes, pressing out all water--wrap in a cloth and chill until hard. Sift three cups of bread flour with one-fourth a teaspoonful of mace and one teaspoonful of salt; rub one of the pats of chilled butter into the sifted flour until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Beat three eggs and stir them with one cup of sugar, two cups of milk, grated rind of one lemon and a yeast cake softened in one-fourth a cup of luke-warm water; combine this mixture with the flour mixture. Beat very hard, adding more flour slowly (five or six cups) until the whole mixture becomes too stiff to handle with a spoon. Turn the dough on (Pg. 198, col. 1--ed.) a floured board and knead until elastic. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with a cloth and place in refrigerator for one-half hour. Chill rolling-pin by placing on ice for one hour. Dredge the moulding board lightly with flour and roll out the chilled dough into a rectangular sheet. Have the sheet of dough a little more than twice the width and three times the length of the second cake of chilled butter. Set the butter in the middle of the lower half of sheet of dough, the greatest length of the butter over the greatest length of the dough. Then turn the dough lengthwise over the butter, thus folding the dough in the center, lengthwise, and enclosing the butter. Press the three open edges of dough together, then fold one end of the dough over and the other under the butter. There will now (Col. 2--ed.) be three layers od dough over and three under the layer of butter. Now turn dough around, in order to roll the sheet of dough in a direction opposite to the first rolling. Then pat gently with (?) and roll the dough into a long strip, taking pains to roll the butter between the layers of dough and without letting the dough break through to the butter. Fold to make three even layers with edges perfectly straight. Then turn dough half way round so as to roll in opposite direction. Repeat process three times. Place in refrigerator for one hour. Twist or roll or cut into desired shapes, arrange in buttered pans--brush with egg and milk mixture--set to rise in a warm temperature two hours, then place in refrigerator until next day. Bake in a moderate oven. Frost with confectioners frosting, tinted as desired; or sprinkle with chopped nuts just before baking; or use as tartlet paste, or as buns, etc. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 06:15:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 02:15:15 EDT Subject: THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915, by The Soda Fountain) Message-ID: THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915) was published by The Soda Fountain magazine. One period advertisement I saw said "by Bob Barnhardt." (Not of the flying Barnharts.) The NYPL's copy has no title page. THE SODA FOUNTAIN was an essential magazine of the soda fountain trade. David Shulman found "egg cream" in a 1906 issue, but the OED's pre-1940 "egg creams" have different ingredients under that name. An "egg cream" contains chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer (carbonated water). There is no egg and no cream. The NYPL catalog states "sent for filming 9-30-99." You can't get the microfilm copy of THE SODA FOUNTAIN. You can't get most of the hard copy issues. It's being filmed 9-30-99! I'll have to check it out at the Library of Congress when I return. THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY is 274 pages and has 1,700 soda fountain formulas. Pg. 41, col. 2--NEW ORLEANS MEAD This beverage, an old stand-by of a quarter of a century ago, is still a favorite in many localities. (Not in DARE--ed.) Pp. 68-69--RICKEYS. Pp. 69-84--Shakes and Egg Drinks. (Several Egg Chocolates are here, but no Egg Cream--ed.) Pg. 88, col. 1--FANCY MIXED DRINKS. (CHOCOLATE NOIR has chocolate syrup, milk, and ice cream; FROSTED CHOCOLATE has chocolate syrup, cream, and carbonated water--ed.) FROZEN CHOCOLATE This is an easily made and a satisfactory chocolate beverage. Shake together 1 1/2 ounces of chocolate syrup and 2 ounces light, sweet cream, or rich milk, with 2 ounces of shaved ice, then add carbonated water to fill a 12-ounce glass. Charge 10 cents. (Is this an "egg cream"?--ed.) Pp. 91-104--HOT SODA. Pp. 132-135--BANANA SPLITS. Pg. 154, col. 2--HOT FUDGE SUNDAE. Pg. 162, col. 1--SWASTIKA Slice 3 bananas, allowing the pieces to drop into a fruit bowl; add half a pint of crushed cherries, 2 ounces of shredded cocoanut and simple syrup q.s. Use one ladleful to each sundae. Sells for 15 cents. (W. R. Sampson.) (An ad for Huyler's in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 January 1908, pg. 1, col. 2, features a swastika. The NY Times ran a piece on the swastika last week--ed.) Pg. 209--SOME SWEET SANDWICH FILLINGS CUBAN SANDWICH To eight ounces of grape fruit marmalade add one half ounce each of chopped candied ginger and candied cherries. Spread thinly. From BBriggs at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 8 14:13:13 2000 From: BBriggs at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (Bonnie Osborn Briggs) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 09:13:13 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: I think this is a regional thing. I've always heard store rather than grocery store or supermarket. Usually if someone is going somewhere other that a grocery store, they call it by name, "I'm going to Target" or I'm going to Sears". However, there is a sticky twist to this situation now that the new "superstores" (Wal-Mart and K-Mart) are now selling groceries as well as the nine million other items they stock. Bonnie Briggs The University of Memphis Natalie Maynor wrote: > This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what > I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery > store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something > set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, > I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say > that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling > that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about > others of you? > > I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently > during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying > whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that > that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 8 15:58:07 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 08:58:07 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008051310.IAA08755@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: --On Sat, Aug 5, 2000 8:10 AM -0500 > Peter McGraw wrote: > >> I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." >> I, too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means >> a food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department >> store, for instance. And Natalie Maynor replied: > This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what > I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery > store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something > set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, > I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say > that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling > that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about > others of you? > You know, I think I've revived "going to the store" only recently, and I'm not sure why. My feeling is that it's been lying in my passive vocabulary for years, but for unknown reasons not pulled out and used. I think what I did before I revived it, and still do probably most of the time, is simply name the store. Because we get most of our groceries at Fred Meyer, most often I say, "I'm going to Freddy's," or less frequently, "I'm stopping at Albertson's on the way home," or (if I'm absolutely sure neither of those will have what we need, and we absolutely have to have it), "I guess I'll go to Safeway." I can't explain why, if my hunch about recent revival is right, I felt no need of a generic word for such a long time. Peter **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 8 16:08:42 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:08:42 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: I find Steve's comment very comforting. After using a diacritical system in my earliest dictionaries and a modified IPA in the 70's (to the acclamation of linguists like Marckwardt), I abandoned both in the 80's and started using a spelling-based system (and it IS a system as explained elsewhere). It's comforting to see professionals resorting to it whey they want to communicate with non-captive, extra-mural audiences (I'm trying not to overload. I could have added audiences that take everything from Oxford as Heaven-sent). And yes, the first syllable of "Putin" should be shown as (POO-) because it is a stressed long-vowel syllable, but my question is, should a symbol be used "to represent the oo of poo" because in English speech, as used by everyone except those just starting ESL, you don't ever end an open syllable (long or short, stressed or unstressed) with a short "oo." (Correct me if I am wrong). This is one of the premises on which my system is based. Isn't this is a good question? THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's™ Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca "Steve K." wrote: > On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 > > Most dictionaries leave stressed long-vowel syllables open, so actually > the first syllable would probably be shown as POO (with the macron or > connector or whatever symbol is used to represent the oo of poo) and the t > would be placed in the second syllable. I should have represented it above > that way. > > --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 16:28:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:28:55 EDT Subject: Thousand Island Dressing; Six Pack; Mexican Salad Message-ID: THOUSAND ISLAND SALAD DRESSING (continued) From the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Good Eating section, 24 March 1999, pg. 6, col. 4: _Island hopping_ We keep hearing about iceberg lettuce making a comeback, so we thought about the 'berg's popular partner, Thousand Island dressing, would be worth a tasting. An Internet surfing expedition yielded some information about its origins: The dressing made its debut at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at the turn of the century. How did it get there? One version from Thousand Islands Inn gives credit to George LaLonde Jr., a fishing guide in the resort town of Clayton, N.Y. Another credits Oscar Tscirky, maitre d' at the hotel. In both cases, the dressing was named for the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Waldorf owner George C. Boldt vacationed in the area. YOU correct the Chicago Tribune on history. By the way, Truman beat Dewey. Yes, Thousand Island dressing was served at the Waldorf, and the Waldorf owner did have a place in the Thousand Islands. Lots of people did. But the books I read about Oscar of the Waldorf don't mention the dressing! The web sites were you'll find the incomplete story include: http://www.1000-islands.com/inn/castle http://www.1000islandsdressing.com/legend.htm A 1914 "Thousand Island" citation is in the recent ADS-L archives. See "Current Messages" and "search" at the top of that on the www.americandialect.org site. "Thousand Island Salad Dressing" is on pg. 710, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1913. "Asparagus with Thousand Island Dressing" is on pg. 748, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1919. "Thousand Island Dressing" is on pg. 454, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, January 1930. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SIX PACK "TAKE HOME! The Pabst Handy-Six" is a photo story in BREWERS JOURNAL, December 1949, pg. 30, col. 1. More on "six pack" if I search that journal later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN SALAD There are many "Mexican Salad" hits for OED to use, if it wants. The recipes are often different. From AMERICAN COOKERY, November 1906, pg. 192, col. 2: _Mexican Salad_ Cut cold, boiled ham, cooked chicken, and cold, boiled potatoes into fine shreds or Juliennes. Take a cup of each, and mix with a tablespoonful and a half of olive oil, a scant tablespoonful of vinegar, a teaspoonful of grated onion, also paprika and salt as needed. When thoroughly mixed, set aside to become chilled and seasoned. In the mean time make ready a cup of shredded celery and one-third a cup of shreds of sweet red pepper. When ready to serve, mix the celery, pepper, and seasoned ingredients with enough mayonnaise dressing to hold them together. Turn them onto a bed of lettuce leaves. Garnish with quarters of hard-cooked egg and chopped white and sifted yolk of egg. From THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915) by the Soda Fountain, pg. 213: MEXICAN SALAD On a couple of lettuce leaves, place a slice of pineapple, three sections of sweet orange, half a dozen seeded malaga grapes, and a couple of Maraschino cherries. Dress with equal parts of whipped cream and Cream Salad Dressing. Sprinkle with ground nut meats and top with a green cherry. From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Tue Aug 8 16:48:10 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:48:10 -0400 Subject: interesting article Message-ID: In today's NYTimes Science Section there is an interesting article, "How Culture Molds Habits of Thought," that might be of interest, especially for folks familiar with the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis and what Steven Pinker calls mentalese. Where language fits into this picture is difficult to say. Joe Pickett http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/080800hth-behavior-culture.html From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 8 17:22:53 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 10:22:53 -0700 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The reply below comes closest of any to answering the question in the original query about what this device had to do with cooties. I never heard "fortune teller" as a name for this device until this thread, and I never saw that version of it. My only encounter with it until now was as a kid in Southern California, where you folded a piece of paper into the requisite shape, then drew spots on four facets and left the other four blank. You would open the device in the direction that revealed the blank facets, then use it to scoop the imagined cooties off the "mark" (I don't remember that it mattered where you scooped) and open it to reveal the facets with the spots, showing him all the cooties you had collected. The response, of course, was an intrigued, "Hey, how did you make that thing?" And another cootie catcher would soon be in production. Peter Mc. --On Sun, Aug 6, 2000 10:42 PM -0700 Rudolph C Troike wrote: > Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can > verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early > to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, > in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had > small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had > been successful. > > Rudy **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 18:17:40 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:17:40 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/2000 11:59:36 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: << And yes, the first syllable of "Putin" should be shown as (POO-) because it is a stressed long-vowel syllable >> Surely there are exceptions to this rule, e.g., where morpheme boundaries (or psuedo morpheme boundaries) are concerned? It would seem to me very unnatural to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 8 18:33:25 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:33:25 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Surely there are exceptions to this rule, e.g., where morpheme boundaries (or > psuedo morpheme boundaries) are concerned? It would seem to me very unnatural > to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. > Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? There's a difference between syllabication dots for hyphenation, and the break one puts in showing a pronunciation. This is true of MW, RHC, WNW, and AHD. DUEL*ING is how the word would be split (in most, if not all American dictionaries) as a headword, but the pronunciation would be shown as doo'ling (with the appropriate diacritics). The point is, the breaks shown in a headword largely stem from typographical conventions, whereas the breaks shown in pronunciations have to do with vowel length, stress, and other factors. Furthermore, some morphemes are broken morphologically, others phonologically. Thus, you will see breaks of CAS*TOR versus CAST*ER; however, the pronunciations for both are kas't at r (@ for schwa). Exact hyphenation rules are largely similar (but not exact) amoung AHD, RHC, MW, and WNW. Likewise, exact pronunciations splits are largely similar (but not exactly the same) among the Big 4. There are oodles of words where the pronunciation split does not mirror the hyphenation split, duelign and boozer are examples of these. I still have a response to Thomas Paikeday's good question, but it will take me a little longer to write it out. --- Steve K. From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 18:42:02 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:42:02 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >>...In >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. > >Rima _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 18:49:28 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:49:28 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/2000 2:33:51 PM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: << There's a difference between syllabication dots for hyphenation, and the break one puts in showing a pronunciation. This is true of MW, RHC, WNW, and AHD. >> thanks, steve, for the lesson in dictionary-making--very useful information i sure have been learning a lot these days from ads-l--including arnold zwicky's typing hints kinda "scary" how much I don't know From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 8 18:52:41 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:52:41 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: Just an elaboration, when it comes to hypenating words, there are actually three methods in place. (none of this has to do with pronunciations, but I thought it might be edifying, or at least interesting.) Certain affixes are strictly morphological, like -ing; the syllable dot will always precede it. (jok*ing, kill*ing) Other affixes are broken phonologically. Still other affixes are broken either phonologcally or morphologically, depending on whether the root they attach to is itself the semantically related word (or would be if you added an e to it). [Thus guid*ance, but fi*nance, broken that way in the Big 4.] (I figured this 'rule' out by analyzing all the words in AHD that ended in -ance, looking for patterns. It was confusing at first, until I realized that in some cases, semantics does come into play: guidance can be seen as guide + ance, whereas that's not the case with finance. This was corroborated by other words.) What's more, the decision of whether to break consonant clusters (like rt or nd) depends on the affix they're attached to. Again, these guidelines of how to break words are based largely on the conventions set forth by typographers. Random House, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage all show a similar pattern; Webster's New World hyphenation leans more toward the morphological (they're more inclined to keep clusters intact where the other 3 would split them). It's a fascinating thing, really. --- Steve K. From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 8 18:55:43 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:55:43 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: Brokaw is widely made fun of (on Imus, etc.) for having great difficulty with medial L. In words like "dollar" (pretty common in the news) he says something like "DOW-er". It gets pretty funny when the medial Ls pile up, as in a word like "colloquially". I expect his copy editors avoid such words in preparing his material, and he probably cuts some himself in rehearsing. But once in a while you've gotta say "dollar" and other common L-full words in reading the news. I don't know the name for this phenomenon, but perhaps others do? Barbara Walters of ABC has a similar problem, but more with R I believe. You may recall how she was made fun of for it years ago by the late Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live, via the character "Baba Wawa". Frank Abate From rkm at SLIP.NET Tue Aug 8 20:59:37 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 13:59:37 -0700 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: >...It would seem to me very unnatural >to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. >Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? I'm sure Steve was referring to the pron field - not the boldfaced entry field for the syllabication. Of course the boldfaced entry would be syllabified by other rules - including root and affix, free forms, etc. The pron field will be syllabified by custom/style/individual dictionary editorial decisions, etc. As to Tom Paikaday's question re the oo for the sound of poo, again that's an editorial decision of the dictionary. Since American dictionaries tend not to use IPA symbols (for reasons discussed in previous threads), we try to be as orthographic in our pronunciation fields as possible. Some dictionaries use ü (u with an umlaut), some the oo with a macron. These obviously can be gotten into with much more detail - but this is a quick response. Rima From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 21:00:14 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:00:14 -0400 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the produce manager the price >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those muskmelons or the >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I asked her what the >difference was between the. She said that she thought they were the >same but that the produce department made a distinction between the >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, Indiana-grown melon >that has natural seams. > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific Armenian variety of >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at Cantelupo, near Rome. >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several different varieties. > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was taught, I'm not sure >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name for what was >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE Michigan also called >them all "mushmelon". > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms among people who are >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > >Herb Stahlke Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very question when I was visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always said 'muskmelon', but I think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I grew up and moved away, while he did not. Our sense is that they refer to the same fruit (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in southern Ohio differed, however. The older uses both terms (and hears 'mushmelon' among still older people, as I do here but did not in Minnesota), while the younger one only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the term 'muskmelon' at all (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a texture-based difference; that does indeed sound like a commercially made up distinction. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 21:16:06 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:16:06 -0400 Subject: Cam(pb)ell In-Reply-To: <398A4571.CE28E771@missouri.edu> Message-ID: At 11:24 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: >Back in 1958 when ZIP Codes first came in, I was living in a town of about >3000 in West >Texas (McCamey). A friend of mine was named Richmond Campbell, and most >of his friends >called him Rich. An acquaintance in Midland (where W is from, kind of) >sent him a note >and on the envelope drew a money bag and a camel and wrote 79752. A day or >so later, the >missive was placed in Richmond's PO box. >I think I usually, maybe always, say the -b- in Campbell, and maybe always >have, but I >can't think of the religious groups as anything other than "Camelites" >because that's the >way Texas members of the group would say the name, though I'd probably say >a slight -b- >unless I were consciously imitating the "Camelites." >DMLance > >Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > > > Arnold Zwicky writes: > > > > >>>>> > > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > > always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends > > married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception > > for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. > > <<<<< Then there's my mother, who was such an extreme spelling-pronouncer that she'd pronounce the word [kaempbEl]. When she asked for Campbell's condensed soups in "the store," people did a double take. She also pronounced 'Louisville' with an [s] and 'Thomas' with theta--unless the latter name referred to someone she knew first orally rather than through writing. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 00:24:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:24:28 -0700 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000808143732.00c17800@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: >What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far >from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal >stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. I wasn't at all implying that it was a regional thing. I was implying that anyone getting paid a 7 figure salary (with no decimal points) to speak - should at least be able to pronounce all 26 letters. Rima From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Wed Aug 9 03:12:30 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 22:12:30 -0500 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar closure. Maybe this is what some perceive as a speech impediment. DMLance Beverly Flanigan wrote: > What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far > from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > > At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > >>...In > >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > > > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. > > > >Rima > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Aug 9 08:46:33 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 01:46:33 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: <200008090401.VAA19832@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Sorry Rima, we don't "pronounce letters". Alphabetic representations of words may or may not have much historical connection with actual pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been pronounced (except perhaps by compulsive spelling-pronouncers like Beverly's mother). Letters don't have sounds: people do. Rudy From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 11:22:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 07:22:55 EDT Subject: Norway nibbles Message-ID: Greetings from Oslo, Norway. The people here are blonde because OSLO is an anagram for Anita LOOS (author of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES). OLSEN DRIVER (NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINKS)--Ginger ale, eplemost, lime, oldevann. PRINCE OF NORWAY (LONG DRINKS)--vodka, apricot brandy, sprite, lime. FRENCH DOG DRESSING (by BAHNCKE)--one place has this along with Hot Dog Dressing. What's the difference--one's for a French poodle? SCANDINAVIA CLUB SANDWICH--bacon, salad, chicken, tomatoes. LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. NACHIPS--Peppes Pizza term for Nacho Chips. From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 13:36:22 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:36:22 +0100 Subject: Pronouncing letters Message-ID: Rudolph C Troike wrote: > Alphabetic representations of > words may or may not have much historical connection with actual > pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been > pronounced The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic (ish) alphabet. I know /l/ has a strong tendency to become a vowel (as in my .signature: 'fa' in Scots is 'fall' (*not* autumn) in English). Was the introduced through spelling reformers? Was it pronounced before the Normans corssed the Channel? I'm genuinely curious as to how the the got into the past tense of our modals, particularly . I also will admit complete ignorance as to the history of the phonology of the modals or high, back vowels followed by . Apologies to the non-linguists. > Letters don't have sounds: people do. Is this linguists' response to the Second Amendment? :-) --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 13:41:39 2000 From: MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM (MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:41:39 EDT Subject: ADS-L Digest - 7 Aug 2000 to 8 Aug 2000 (#2000-222) Message-ID: My mother's friend from Henry Co. TN and Calloway Co., KY refuses to use the word cantaloupe and calls all mushmellon. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 13:54:39 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:54:39 +0100 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles Message-ID: > LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for that--plenty in the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. (I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) Lynne From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Wed Aug 9 14:55:46 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 10:55:46 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Sorry I missed the good clean water that flowed under the bridge while I was asleep. About the long and short of the "oo" sound, I would like to ask why umlauts and such diacritics on the one hand and symbols unprintable in Roman letters (as in IPA) should be imposed on the general public who are not taking courses in phonetics. Of course, this is not fair to teachers of phonetics - seems to question the reason for their existence. But talking about people who just want to decode pronunciations without learning to use totally new and abstract systems, diacritical, IPA, spelling-based, or what have you, are systems more important than the people they serve? For example, what's the earthly use of transcribing "stone" as (STOHN) or "rage" as (RAYJ) in a spelling-based system? Why not give dictionary users the benefit of the doubt, namely that they do read English at the "elementary level" (give or take a few years) and leave well enough alone? Back to the "poo-" sounds, if you take the more common headwords of a dictionary for the people, we have the following entries: poo, pooch, poodle, pooh, pooh-bah, pooh-pooh, pool, poop, poor, etc. The question is, which of these need transcription into an abstract system for the benefit of the English user who reads at the elementary level? Does a normal English speaker ever try to say any of those words with a short "oo"? How about getting a little more narrow and showing that the initial open "p" is aspirate in English? "Poor" may be neither long nor short, but isn't it an academic question to be tackled at the ESL starting level? In 1983-84, I field-tested an 85,000-entry dictionary using American high-school teachers from coast to coast and their students and the responses were near unanimous. Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do you define "system"? How you pronounce the word is (SIS.tum) in my book, in case anyone wondered if it was (SICE.tum). I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). In other dictionaries it is: (a) (sis[primary stress].t[schwa]m) in most diacritical systems; (b) ([primary stress]s[dotless "i"]s.t[schwa]m), as in IPA; (c) (sis[boldfaced][hyphen instead of dot or space]t["e" carrying a breve mark]m), as in Oxford American Dictionary. I object to the use of breve "e" on phonetic grounds. I think unstressed "u+consonant" is more correct than "breve e+consonant" if you look at English spelling patterns. Thanks for your expert reactions. Tom Paikeday ========================= THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's™ Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 9 15:04:34 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 11:04:34 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: Rima McKinzey writes: >>>>> I wasn't at all implying that it was a regional thing. I was implying that anyone getting paid a 7 figure salary (with no decimal points) to speak - should at least be able to pronounce all 26 letters. <<<<< As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? TouGH! (Sorry... but not very ;-)\ ) -- Mark (Completions and improvements are welcome!) Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From stevek at SHORE.NET Wed Aug 9 15:18:29 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 11:18:29 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <399170F1.A68F332D@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: My main problem with some of the eye-spelling approach to pronunciations is that single characters are used to represent more than one sound. Whereas you can use an i-macron and an i-breve to distinguish between the i of like and the i of pit, in most eye-spelling systems you have to rely on some type of convention -- usually a 'silent' e after a consonant that follows a long vowel, or a doubling the consonant that follows the short vowel. What's worse, if a syllable is itself a word, sometimes you'll see 'nut' represented as NUT but a syllable that's 'dut', since dut is not not a word, you'll see represented as DUTT. There are certain words that become incomprehensible when using some type of new system spelling. I've seen 'ice' represented as EYESS, for example. What's worse, for the ESL market, representing vowel length by means of following doubled consonants or silent e is not a wise choice when in so many languages, final e is pronunced. In one analysis I did of children's dictionaries, some use the same pronunciation symbol in 2, sometimes 3 different ways. o-breve is o-breve. Using 'o' to cover both o-breve and o-macron isn't helpful when you're requiring other clues (doubled consonants, silent e) to be the item that determines its length. People may say they want keyless pronunciations, but people also told McDonalds that they wanted lower-fat, vegetarian options, and when those were trotted out, they failed miserably. The phonemic systems employed by the American Big 4 work well for native speakers of English. I agree that other systems are necessary for ESL speakers, but the above concerns with regard to silent e and consonant doubling should be taken into account. As far as general American dictionaries are concerned, if it ain't broke, dont' fix it. It's simple to grasp that i-breve is the i sound of pit, and once you've got that down, you don't have to try to second guess the conventions of an eye-pron system. --- Steve K. From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 9 15:52:01 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 08:52:01 -0700 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: My understanding of the difference, for what its worth, is that the New World variety is muskmelon and the Old World variety is canteloupe, but most North Americans call a muskmelon a canteloupe because of the dominant influence of Old World culture in N. America and because the two varieties are basically the same in the eyes of us common folk. This has just been picked up in bits and pieces through the years, no single source. Someone at Burpee or another seed supplier might provide enlightenment, if any of you have a contact with such a person. --- Beverly Flanigan wrote: > At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: > >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the > produce manager the price > >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those > muskmelons or the > >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I > asked her what the > >difference was between the. She said that she > thought they were the > >same but that the produce department made a > distinction between the > >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, > Indiana-grown melon > >that has natural seams. > > > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific > Armenian variety of > >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at > Cantelupo, near Rome. > >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several > different varieties. > > > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was > taught, I'm not sure > >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name > for what was > >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE > Michigan also called > >them all "mushmelon". > > > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms > among people who are > >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > > > >Herb Stahlke > > Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very > question when I was > visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always > said 'muskmelon', but I > think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I > grew up and moved > away, while he did not. Our sense is that they > refer to the same fruit > (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in > southern Ohio differed, > however. The older uses both terms (and hears > 'mushmelon' among still > older people, as I do here but did not in > Minnesota), while the younger one > only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the > term 'muskmelon' at all > (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a > texture-based > difference; that does indeed sound like a > commercially made up distinction. > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of > Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH > 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 9 16:26:54 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:26:54 -0700 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: I just followed some of my own advice, went to the Burpee Webpage, and searched for both muskmelon and cantaloupe. http://www.burpee.com/ Both muskmelons and cantaloupes are listed, and sometimes both words are used in describing a particular melon, but one variety is marked... "Vedrantais Heirloom Melon HEIRLOOM.Charentais-type melons are the real cantaloupes, born in Italy and refined in France. $2.95" Based on the small picture, they have a smooth skin, no evident veining, and look nothing like the cantaloupe sold in local stores. The color is yellow with dark green stripes running from bud to stem. It's hard to judge accurately from the picture, but they also appear to be smaller than a typical "cantaloupe". --- Beverly Flanigan wrote: > At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: > >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the > produce manager the price > >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those > muskmelons or the > >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I > asked her what the > >difference was between the. She said that she > thought they were the > >same but that the produce department made a > distinction between the > >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, > Indiana-grown melon > >that has natural seams. > > > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific > Armenian variety of > >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at > Cantelupo, near Rome. > >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several > different varieties. > > > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was > taught, I'm not sure > >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name > for what was > >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE > Michigan also called > >them all "mushmelon". > > > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms > among people who are > >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > > > >Herb Stahlke > > Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very > question when I was > visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always > said 'muskmelon', but I > think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I > grew up and moved > away, while he did not. Our sense is that they > refer to the same fruit > (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in > southern Ohio differed, > however. The older uses both terms (and hears > 'mushmelon' among still > older people, as I do here but did not in > Minnesota), while the younger one > only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the > term 'muskmelon' at all > (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a > texture-based > difference; that does indeed sound like a > commercially made up distinction. > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of > Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH > 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 16:04:41 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 12:04:41 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) Message-ID: Steve K said: >> My main problem with some of the eye-spelling approach to pronunciations is that single characters are used to represent more than one sound. Whereas you can use an i-macron and an i-breve to distinguish between the i of like and the i of pit, in most eye-spelling systems you have to rely on some type of convention -- usually a 'silent' e after a consonant that follows a long vowel, or a doubling the consonant that follows the short vowel. What's worse, if a syllable is itself a word, sometimes you'll see 'nut' represented as NUT but a syllable that's 'dut', since dut is not not a word, you'll see represented as DUTT. There are certain words that become incomprehensible when using some type of new system spelling. I've seen 'ice' represented as EYESS, for example. What's worse, for the ESL market, representing vowel length by means of following doubled consonants or silent e is not a wise choice when in so many languages, final e is pronunced. In one analysis I did of children's dictionaries, some use the same pronunciation symbol in 2, sometimes 3 different ways. o-breve is o-breve. Using 'o' to cover both o-breve and o-macron isn't helpful when you're requiring other clues (doubled consonants, silent e) to be the item that determines its length. People may say they want keyless pronunciations, but people also told McDonalds that they wanted lower-fat, vegetarian options, and when those were trotted out, they failed miserably. The phonemic systems employed by the American Big 4 work well for native speakers of English. I agree that other systems are necessary for ESL speakers, but the above concerns with regard to silent e and consonant doubling should be taken into account. As far as general American dictionaries are concerned, if it ain't broke, dont' fix it. It's simple to grasp that i-breve is the i sound of pit, and once you've got that down, you don't have to try to second guess the conventions of an eye-pron system. << ************* While I don't dispute the truth in some of Steve's points and criticisms, I must add that, in informal surveys of non-specialist, non-linguist, non-editor users, we have found that many just ignore the prons in the general dictionaries, largely because they can't make out what the prons are trying to say/show. There are many, esp. older dict users, who are totally put off by schwa. Many schools are now teaching schwa, so the problem may be lessening among younger users. In my own immediate family the dict-style prons I have shown them as a test are regularly misinterpreted. The problem is in ignoring the pron key. No one wants to look at a pron key, anymore than normal users of dicts EVER read the introductory matter to see what the lexicographers were intending to do. I don't know if you can attribute all this to general human laziness or what, but the point is that users DON'T do it, and you can't make them, and one certainly shouldn't assume that they do or will. So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke . . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check spelling and meaning. I for one would love to see a keyless SYSTEM implemented in any major American dict. I think it would be a step toward better understanding, and wider use of the prons. Tom Paikeday has developed a pretty good one in his "User's Webster Dictionary", and it deserves serious consideration by pronunciation editors and linguists. btw, I am ardently part of the anti-IPA school when it comes to general dicts. It's OK for ESL dicts, totally useless, if not damaging, in general dicts. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Wed Aug 9 14:43:51 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:43:51 -0500 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lefses are super thin potato pancakes. They are also good slathered with butter. By all means avoid lutefisk in white sauce, but try it mixed with forked-mashed potatoes and butter. Bob Wachal At 02:54 PM 8/9/00 +0100, you wrote: >> LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. > >It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for that--plenty in >the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. > >(I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) > >Lynne > > From stevek at SHORE.NET Wed Aug 9 16:47:01 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 12:47:01 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) In-Reply-To: <200008091606.MAA37176@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > > So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke >. . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the > prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look > up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check >spelling and meaning. In the instances where people do go to a dictionary to specifically look up a pronunciation, would you hazard a guess as to whether they would then use the pron key, particularly if the pron key is printed on every spread? In the AHD, it's out in the column and noticeable, so the user doesn't have to go far to use it. -- Steve K. From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 17:02:44 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:02:44 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > > So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke >. . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the > prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look > up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check >spelling and meaning. Steve K. replied: In the instances where people do go to a dictionary to specifically look up a pronunciation, would you hazard a guess as to whether they would then use the pron key, particularly if the pron key is printed on every spread? In the AHD, it's out in the column and noticeable, so the user doesn't have to go far to use it. *********** Steve: For those times a dict user DOES go to look up a pron (a tiny minority of overall dict look-ups, I contend), sure, they might look to the pron key, if it's handy, as on every spread, as it has been in most of the top Amer dicts. But even these curious folks might have trouble with a key. We'd have to ask in a survey. But, note that the new Web New World 4th ed. (1999) now has no pron key in the text, just a note sending users to the front matter. The WNW folks have decided that the space for more entries is more valuable than the pron key being printed 750 or so times. I think they made a sound decision. We (that is, dict editors) need a sizable survey of real users to determine how dicts are actually used, and for what purposes people turn to them, and how satisfied they are after use. I have only my personal observations and intuition to go on. Could ADS sponsor a survey of dictionary users? Sent by email (no mailing cost)? I'll be happy to draft one, if there is some assurance that it will be sent and the responses compiled, for general use, no restrictions. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From RonButters at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 17:32:28 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:32:28 EDT Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical "sponsor." My chief questions (speaking as a member of the ADS Executive Committee) are as follows: 1. What lists would the survey be sent to? How could we ensure that it would be a valid sampling of users? 2. Who would do the actual work of accumulating e-mail addresses and compiling the results? 3. How could we insure that the data then became available without restrictions? 4. What would it really mean to "sponsor" such a survey? The more I think about it (and I am just thinking about this off the top of my head right now) this sounds like an excellent research project for some academic who simply wants to do such a survey as a part of their normal research--results could then be published in DICTIONARIES (or even AMERICAN SPEECH). If some ADS member wants to make a proposal to the ADS Executive Committee, they should do so by writing to the ADS Executive Secretary, Allan Metcalf, at . Probably would be a good idea to explore the idea with Allan before making a formal proposal. In a message dated 8/9/2000 1:15:06 PM, fabate at BLR.COM writes: << Could ADS sponsor a survey of dictionary users? Sent by email (no mailing cost)? I'll be happy to draft one, if there is some assurance that it will be sent and the responses compiled, for general use, no restrictions.>> From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 17:45:51 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 18:45:51 +0100 Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: Ron Butters said: > I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical > "sponsor." Another idea would be to get a publisher to sponsor it. Publishers have money, scholarly organizations tend not to. Then perhaps the project could be funded and/or could make use of the publisher's staff for compiling the results. One problem with this would be the proprietary 'rights' of the publisher regarding the information collected. So, another option would be to ask for DSNA 'sponsorship' of the project (say, as a DSNA taskforce on pronunciation) and then ask a bunch of publishers to underwrite it, so that the money comes in but the information stays public. While it was claimed that this could be done for 'free', it seems like a lot of labor, which isn't really free... Lynne From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Wed Aug 9 17:40:58 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <3990CC15.E30EDEE9@missouri.edu> Message-ID: Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: >He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar >closure. Maybe this is >what some perceive as a speech impediment. >DMLance > >Beverly Flanigan wrote: > > > What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far > > from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > > stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > > > > At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > > >>...In > > >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > > > > > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech > impediment. > > > > > >Rima > > > > _____________________________________________ > > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 9 17:47:49 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:47:49 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) In-Reply-To: <200008091704.NAA41990@listserv.cc.uga.edu> from "Frank Abate" at Aug 09, 2000 01:02:44 PM Message-ID: > But, note that the new Web New World 4th ed. (1999) now has no pron > key in the text, just a note sending users to the front matter. The > WNW folks have decided that the space for more entries is more > valuable than the pron key being printed 750 or so times. I think > they made a sound decision. Random House made such a decision in 1997 or 1998 or so, by the way. Jesse Sheidlower OED From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Wed Aug 9 17:48:29 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:48:29 -0400 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000809094351.007c1480@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: I agree with both comments! As a Minnesotan who grew up eating lutefisk and lefse, especially at Christmas, I can say lefse is wonderful--more of a pancake than a crepe, and generally cooked so that brown freckles appear all over the potato cake, which is 8-10 inches in diameter, spread with butter and maybe sugar, and rolled up to eat with fingers. Flour dough can be used, but mashed potatoes are better. And pour melted butter over the lutefisk, which is cod preserved in lye (yes!); it's rinsed several times to remove the lye, then poached in cheesecloth and eaten--a bit rubbery, and definitely an acquired taste. Most of my family will no longer touch the stuff. At 09:43 AM 8/9/00 -0500, you wrote: >Lefses are super thin potato pancakes. They are also good slathered with >butter. > >By all means avoid lutefisk in white sauce, but try it mixed with >forked-mashed potatoes and butter. > >Bob Wachal > >At 02:54 PM 8/9/00 +0100, you wrote: > >> LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. > > > >It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for >that--plenty in > >the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. > > > >(I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) > > > >Lynne > > > > _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Wed Aug 9 18:11:54 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:11:54 -0400 Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: <> I'm all for finding out more about how people use dictionaries and the difficulties they have, and I'm all for making dictionaries as user-friendly as we can. But I am skeptical of Frank's notion of basing a dictionary on how most users use the dictionary most of the time. Consider the logic: If people almost never use the dictionary for pronunciations anyway, what's the point in including them? What's the point in going through the trouble of changing the pronunciation system to another one that has its own rules and transformations? Will people be more likely to read the pronunciations under a "newspaper" style system if they didn't under a conventional treatement? will they be able to disentangle the ambiguities? does it matter? It doesn't seem to bother the editors of our newspapers. To the bigger questions: If we are basing the structure and content of the dictionary on the relative frequency with which people look up specific parts of it, why should we include function words and basic verbs and all sorts of other things that most people do not bother to look at, since they "know" them already? An education researcher once objected to me that children really didn't need to wade through all those basic words like do and of. Kids really needed a streamlined dictionary that contained just what they needed know. In other words, I told her, she wanted a children's dictionary that did not have the easy words or the really hard adult words, but just the words that were pretty hard. How were we supposed to identify those pretty hard words? pretty hard for who? pretty hard for what situation? The problem always boils down to education. A dictionary is after all a very sophisticated research tool that compresses a lot of information about words into a very tiny space and requires lots of mental maneuvering (much of which eventually becomes automatic to verbal sophisticates) to yield productive knowledge. How thoroughly should dictionary makers expect the education system to teach students the conventions of the dictionary entry? Dictionary skills have come and gone like many other educational fads. The alternative is to try to make dictionaries more user-friendly in their structure and content. Efforts to make dictionaries more user-friendly inevitably require more space (as in the discursive style of defining that is common to kids' dictionaries: "To rob means to take something away from someone.") But when you add more text, you require more reading, and this itself has pedagogical limitations, since it makes no sense to write discursive definitions (or add grammatical information, etc.), if readers are turned off by too much text, and stop reading after the first two lines of an entry. And this leads to inevitable discussions about what is dispensable in order to accommodate the more discursive treatment. I'm not dismissing Frank's ideas. I'm just saying that this is a very complicated matter that does not have an easy solution, and that this may be why dictionary makers have stuck to their conventional treatment of pronunciation and many other things. It's the devil you know. Joe Pickett From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 18:38:51 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:38:51 -0400 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: Further to Ron and Lynne's comments on a survey of dict users: Ron Butters said: >>I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical "sponsor." My chief questions (speaking as a member of the ADS Executive Committee) are as follows: 1. What lists would the survey be sent to? How could we ensure that it would be a valid sampling of users? 2. Who would do the actual work of accumulating e-mail addresses and compiling the results? 3. How could we insure that the data then became available without restrictions? 4. What would it really mean to "sponsor" such a survey? << F Abate in reply: DSNA is a more logical sponsor, but it would be best to have ADS involved, too, as it is a larger group and has important expertise to add that DSNA may not have. 1. We need research done ($) to determine and buy ($$) the best lists. Validity should be shown by standard statistical methods. A survey company would have this expertise ($$$). 2. Survey company ($$$), or a team of grad students under an academician ($$), following a written procedure. 3. Sponsoring ($$$) must be with no strings, per a contract. If you want the full results, you gotta ante up, and then you can use the data as you please. 4. The survey would be under the aegis of ADS and DSNA, with (paying) corporate/publisher sponsors (Lynne M's idea). Ron B continues: >> The more I think about it (and I am just thinking about this off the top of my head right now) this sounds like an excellent research project for some academic who simply wants to do such a survey as a part of their normal research--results could then be published in DICTIONARIES (or even AMERICAN SPEECH). If some ADS member wants to make a proposal to the ADS Executive Committee, they should do so by writing to the ADS Executive Secretary, Allan Metcalf, at . Probably would be a good idea to explore the idea with Allan before making a formal proposal. << **************** from Lynne's email: >> Ron Butters said: > I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical > "sponsor." Another idea would be to get a publisher to sponsor it. Publishers have money, scholarly organizations tend not to. Then perhaps the project could be funded and/or could make use of the publisher's staff for compiling the results. One problem with this would be the proprietary 'rights' of the publisher regarding the information collected. So, another option would be to ask for DSNA 'sponsorship' of the project (say, as a DSNA taskforce on pronunciation) and then ask a bunch of publishers to underwrite it, so that the money comes in but the information stays public. While it was claimed that this could be done for 'free', it seems like a lot of labor, which isn't really free... Lynne << Frank A in reply: Asking publishers is a great idea. As with the Amer Natl Corpus effort, if there are several involved, no ONE can claim ownership. That would be a contractual condition of the sponsorship agreement they would sign. It will not be free, but costs could be determined up front, and a budget circulated, so sponsors could see what they're paying for. ADS and DSNA would provide technical guidance and "sanction" the validity of the survey. I expect that lowest cost would be in an academic setting with a faculty person suprevising a team of students. But their methodology has to be set in advance, blessed by the ADS and DSNA, and then they must follow it, to ensure statistical validity. My offer to draft the questionnaire stands. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 19:06:00 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 20:06:00 +0100 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: > My offer to draft the questionnaire stands. > > Frank Abate I'm not sure who you're making this offer to... I think, if you're interested in taking on this project and are interested in getting the project sponsored/funded, then you (or someone) needs to draw up a proposal to take to DSNA or ADS and whatever funding sources. That might involve a draft Qnaire, which might benefit from review by others. But even though the project might be 'sponsored' by an organization, it would need an individual to be its PI (principal investigator) and get credit for the ideas and any publications that came out of it. The worst part about writing proposals is that they usually take as much work as writing an article, and you don't get to put the proposal on your CV! Lynne, who wants a Pulitzer prize category for proposals, applications, and nominations From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 18:54:48 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:54:48 -0400 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: Joe Pickett said: >> I'm all for finding out more about how people use dictionaries and the difficulties they have, and I'm all for making dictionaries as user-friendly as we can. But I am skeptical of Frank's notion of basing a dictionary on how most users use the dictionary most of the time. << I would be skeptical too, Joe. I don't mean that we should BASE a dict--style, scope, format, etc.--on what a survey says, but merely that a sound survey would allow us to set priorities better, without relying solely on intuition and tradition. If we find that most users don't use the prons because they can't interpret them, then it behooves the dict editors to change the pron style. On the other hand, we may learn that they in fact use them all the time, and largely without trouble (which I very much doubt, but let the survey guide us). Also, a survey may inform us on the ways to order or present other elements of entries. People (but what percentage?) seem to like word histories, but what percentage can interpret the very abbreviated style of etymologies seen in several dicts? Perhaps the algebraic-looking, abbreviation-laden etyms are a waste for most users? Who really knows? I'd like to know what the "typical" user prefers, based on solid numbers. Different editors and publishers could interpret and implement policies based on that data any way they choose. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Wed Aug 9 19:00:32 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:00:32 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000809133333.0169e180@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: You know, I find Brokaw damned entertaining, and that's because of his eccentric speech. (Since I enjoy it, I won't call it a speech impediment.) He's a fair journalist, and a good bit easier to take than Baba Wawa. But in defense of even that over-inflated idiot, I still enjoy hearing diversity on the radio or television. Just because they're network anchors doesn't mean that they should speak some flawless "standard" English. And how's about Rather? His speech may be fairly "correct" (oh my god, look at all the scare quotes), but his delivery is more wooden than the collected members of the Sequoia National Forest. The best American English you'll hear on a network newscast is from Peter Jennings, a Canadian. I think it's all part of some kinda plot. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was > mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal > stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's > minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a > Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. > > At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: >> He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar >> closure. Maybe this is >> what some perceive as a speech impediment. >> DMLance >> >> Beverly Flanigan wrote: >> >>> What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far >>> from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal >>> stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. >>> >>> At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >>>>> ...In >>>>> the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. >>>> >>>> Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech >> impediment. >>>> >>>> Rima >>> >>> _____________________________________________ >>> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >>> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >>> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >>> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 19:49:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:49:15 EDT Subject: Fwd: "Coffee Break" in a union contract Message-ID: This internet place in Oslo offers "Quiche a la Hotmail." I don't know what's in it--probably spam instead of bacon. I was told that "coffee break" was in union contracts from the 1940s, but I guess I was misinformed. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Carrolyn A. Davis" Subject: "Coffee Break" in a union contract Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 10:41:49 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2714 URL: From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 9 21:20:56 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 17:20:56 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: I recall my father having talked much about the organization of the ACD being based in part on a survey done in college classrooms. I don't know if I can find a copy. If I do, it might be helpful in constructing a new survey. Indeed, I believe a survey should be undertaken. Perhaps two surveys: (1) the old-fashioned kind where the responses can be somewhat more controlled than one done on the Internet, and (2) an e-mail survey which might be targeted at more than one market (one for teachers, one for students, one for "pop" critics). I think that perhaps a committee of five should be selected (2 from ADS; 2 from DSNA; and coordinator). Funding could be solicited from the major North American dictionary publishers of college dictionaries. Another, more scholarly approach would be to solicit the support (and or advice) of the ACLS. Other sources might include MLA, NCTE, and the like. Regards, DKB David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR Wed Aug 9 18:10:52 2000 From: JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR (JIM.WALKER) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 20:10:52 +0200 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already there? Jim From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Wed Aug 9 22:28:46 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 18:28:46 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 5:20 PM -0400 8/9/2000, Barnhart wrote, ostensibly about CLB's dictionary survey: >I recall my father having talked much about the organization of the ACD >being based in part on a survey done in college classrooms. I don't >know if I can find a copy. If I do, it might be helpful in >constructing a new survey. > >Indeed, I believe a survey should be undertaken. Perhaps two surveys: >(1) the old-fashioned kind where the responses can be somewhat more >controlled than one done on the Internet, and (2) an e-mail survey >which might be targeted at more than one market (one for teachers, one >for students, one for "pop" critics). > >I think that perhaps a committee of five should be selected (2 from >ADS; 2 from DSNA; and coordinator). Funding could be solicited from >the major North American dictionary publishers of college dictionaries. > Another, more scholarly approach would be to solicit the support (and >or advice) of the ACLS. Other sources might include MLA, NCTE, and >the like. > I think one has to be very careful about relying too heavily on an email survey, for several reasons. One is that email users are not necessarily representative of dictionary users in general. Another is that any properly random email survey would be treated like spam by a large number of recipients. To do it electronically, I'd do it off of the ADS (or some other) web site, with announcements in various places (sci.lang, alt.usage.english, etc), though even that runs the risk of being treated as spam. -- Alice Faber tel. (203) 865-6163 Haskins Laboratories fax (203) 865-8963 270 Crown St new improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 22:43:47 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:43:47 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Sorry Rima, we don't "pronounce letters". ... Aw, c'mon you guys - mine was a glib (but funny, I thought) statement. Should I have instead written something like, Well,in my humble opinion, a professional speaker of English should be able to pronounce all phonemic sounds in at least one of the more-or-less standardized allomorphs? It just happens that Tom Brokaw's particular brand of pronunciation is particularly difficult for me to listen to, and so I try to avoid him. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 22:43:47 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:43:47 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't really remember all of them just now. Rima From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Thu Aug 10 01:47:05 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:47:05 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Good question! I did think about this when revising what I had written, but decided not to be too Jesuitic after spending 11 years in bed with them. Thanks anyway, Jim. TOM. P.S. My friend didn't know he was in Reading - a question of being and knowing, I suppose. =================================================== "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Thu Aug 10 01:54:19 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:54:19 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Good question! I did think about this when revising what I had written, but decided not to be too Jesuitic after spending 11 years in bed with them. On the positive side, I am happy about the initiatives being taken by Frank Abate and Ron Butters in the fact-finding direction. Thanks, Jim. TOM. P.S. My friend didn't know he was in Reading - a question of being and knowing, I suppose. =================================================== "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 10 02:44:47 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:44:47 -0500 Subject: Hyphenation In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Would that it were so. I have seen some much BAD hyphenation in the newspapers and books (even Harry Potter!), with biking, for example, hyphenated between just about any two letters, or don't hyphenated between the o and the n. This is clearly a fourth method (hit-or-miss!). Barbara Need Uchicago--Linguistics >Just an elaboration, when it comes to hypenating words, there are actually >three methods in place. (none of this has to do with pronunciations, but I >thought it might be edifying, or at least interesting.) > >Certain affixes are strictly morphological, like -ing; the syllable dot >will always precede it. (jok*ing, kill*ing) > >Other affixes are broken phonologically. > >Still other affixes are broken either phonologcally or morphologically, >depending on whether the root they attach to is itself the semantically >related word (or would be if you added an e to it). [Thus guid*ance, but >fi*nance, broken that way in the Big 4.] (I figured this 'rule' out by >analyzing all the words in AHD that ended in -ance, looking for >patterns. It was confusing at first, until I realized that in some >cases, semantics does come into play: guidance can be seen as >guide + ance, whereas that's not the case with finance. This was >corroborated by other words.) What's more, the decision of whether to >break consonant clusters (like rt or nd) depends on the affix they're >attached to. Again, these guidelines of how to break words are based >largely on the conventions set forth by typographers. > >Random House, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage all show a similar >pattern; Webster's New World hyphenation leans more toward the >morphological (they're more inclined to keep clusters intact where the >other 3 would split them). > >It's a fascinating thing, really. > >--- Steve K. From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 10 02:42:47 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:42:47 -0500 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: <39915E56.78BE0113@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: >Rudolph C Troike wrote: > >> Alphabetic representations of >> words may or may not have much historical connection with actual >> pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been >> pronounced > >The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic >(ish) alphabet. I know /l/ has a strong tendency to become a vowel (as >in my .signature: 'fa' in Scots is 'fall' (*not* autumn) in English). >Was the introduced through spelling reformers? Was it pronounced >before the Normans corssed the Channel? I'm genuinely curious as to how >the the got into the past tense of our modals, particularly >. I also will admit complete ignorance as to the history of the >phonology of the modals or high, back vowels followed by . > No, the in _could_ was not pronounced, because the in that word doesn't belong there: it has come into the word from _would_ and _should_. My guess is is after /l/ in those words was no longer pronounced (perhaps an early velarization of /l/) and then the words sounded alike. _could_ is from OE _cuD_ (the D is an edh, so, ModE couth). Obviously, there was also a change in teh pronuniciation of the final sound. Barbara Need UChicago--Linguistics From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 12:25:41 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:25:41 +0100 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Thinking more about dictionary surveys... I've read various studies based on surveys, and I have to admit that when I read them, I doubt their usefulness. (They're better than nothing, but...) If someone asked me what I do when I use a dictionary, I doubt that what I remembered doing would be the same as what I actually do. For instance, if you asked me if I use the dictionary for pronunciations never/occasionally/sometimes/often, I'd really be doing no better than guessing, I think. I'd be more interested in either tracking actual use or controlled-observation studies. Tracking could consist of having a set of volunteers (perhaps households) keep a record of when/why/how they use a dictionary over the course of, say, a year. They could, for instance, be given a worksheet to keep with their dictionary, in which they note the date, the word, what part of the entry they were looking for (definition, pronunciation),how satisfactory they found the information and how easily they found it on a scale of 1-5. Am I making this up, or did someone already do a study like this that is creeping out from my subconscious? Controlled observation would involve setting a task for volunteers and watching how they achieve the goal. So, for example, have the volunteers look up a word to see how to pronounce it. One way of achieving this would be to videotape the process, possibly having the volunteer 'think aloud' about what they are doing. If someone were interested in a collaborative project like one of those, I would probably be interested in participating. I'd be particularly interested in tracking dictionary use in classrooms... Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 12:29:07 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:29:07 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't > really remember all of them just now. > > Rima Well, is the Q in 'acquire' silent, or is it the C? (Or is someone going to tell me there's a geminate /k/ there?) Lynne From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Thu Aug 10 14:41:46 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:41:46 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Lynne, your thoughts are very good. I'd like to work on some form of tracking. I think a classroom or library setting is more likely to be useful than home studies. Perhaps a collaborative effort by ADS, DSNA, Euralex, and the American Library Association (and Britisth Library Association) would be fundable. College classrooms are the obvious place. However, high school libraries might be useful, too. Perhaps we could do something through the Dictionary Companion. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 10 14:17:24 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 07:17:24 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: The"o" in "iron" is silent?? --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: > >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", > "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", > >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", > "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", > >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? > > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with > a silent letter > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for > q? I don't > really remember all of them just now. > > Rima ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 14:24:02 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:24:02 +0100 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: > From: Barnhart at highlands.com (Barnhart)> > Lynne, your thoughts are very good. I'd like to work on some form of > tracking. I think a classroom or library setting is more likely to be > useful than home studies. Perhaps a collaborative effort by ADS, DSNA, > Euralex, and the American Library Association (and Britisth Library > Association) would be fundable. College classrooms are the obvious > place. However, high school libraries might be useful, too. Perhaps > we could do something through the Dictionary Companion. Libraries are a good idea--school libraries would be most manageable, since they have a limited clientele, and so it would be easy to instruct people to fill out the forms. I don't think dictionaries are used all that much in college classrooms--I've always required that students buy a dictionary, but not that they lug it to class, and no classrooms I've taught in have a dictionary in situ. If we did school classrooms, perhaps it could be done within a few school districts across a number of grades. Of course, if I'm involved it does bring up the transatlantic question, but since I'm on the DSNA schools taskforce, I don't see any reason not to focus at this point on the US (if it's a schools survey), and then do a second study in the UK. Seems like it would be easier to keep things in one country at a time. So, I see a number of possible tracking studies here: - cross-grade within schools (classrooms and libraries) - college-level (send students home with worksheets, and possibly also do libraries; would be tracking a number of individuals through a semester or year) - public libraries (tracks what the dictionaries are used for, but not what individual variation there is in dictionary use) - household use? (Nielsen families for dictionaries?) More variables: - what country/ies (US first, UK next?) - what dictionaries (e.g., would all schools in the study have the same dictionary series, or would we try for equal numbers of different series? I vote for many different--try to get underwriting from the different publishers) - what about electronic dictionaries? do we also need to track these to see to what degree they are displacing print dictionaries, and whether some dictionary-uses are favored for print vs electronic? More funding thoughts: - state and federal education departments; this might be the kind of thing that one could get a big govt grant for (if it's a school study, that is). - from publishers: maybe one way to get school participation would be to get that school dictionary upgrades; or a way to get individual participation would be to 'pay' them with reference books (earn a thesaurus by using the dictionary!). Has a study like this been done for learner dictionaries? I'm thinking that there's probably been a lot done by the ESL dictionary makers (esp in UK). Such things might provide models. I might've seen something like this in the Longman dictionary newsletter-journal thing. So much more fun to work on a future project than a present one. Back to writing. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From kelly at BARD.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:07:53 2000 From: kelly at BARD.EDU (Robert Kelly) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:07:53 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <20000810141724.28531.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o' On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, James Smith wrote: > The"o" in "iron" is silent?? > > --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: > > >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", > > "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", > > >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", > > "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", > > >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? > > > > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with > > a silent letter > > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for > > q? I don't > > really remember all of them just now. > > > > Rima > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. > http://invites.yahoo.com/ > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 10 14:17:11 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:17:11 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday writes: >>>>> Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do you define "system"? <<<<< You have hit the nail on the head. English spelling is so chaotic and context-dependent that any phonological "system" based on it must fail, as the users either - take more material as context than the system intended, or less - blow off reading the definition of context - throw up their hands at added symbols intended to define context "self-evidently" - encounter a foreign or "green card" word whose pronunciation defies their expectations (The example I remember of the last one, perhaps from _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ [or was it vice versa?], was "Skoplje". Can anyone give this a clear keyless pron for Americans?!) A senior co-worker once objected to the symbols I was establishing for the phonemes of American English: "Surely you can make them clearer so they'll be obvious to any native speaker." "No, I can't," I replied, "and if you think you can, you're welcome to try." "Well, no, I don't have the time or the knowledge. That's your department. But surely they don't have to need a key!" "I've tried and I've tried. It's inherent in English spelling, and it's like the pile of dirt under the rug. Any time you make something clearer in one place you end up making something else more obscure. This is the best I can do, and I daresay close to the best anyone can do." I don't know if he ever believed me, but I had the last word. As he said, it was my department. Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:44:28 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:44:28 -0500 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: The stigmatized South Midland pronunciation rhymes with their 'barn' and the less stigmatized pronunciation rhymes with Inland Northerners' pronunciation of 'barn'. DMLance Robert Kelly wrote: > I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though > a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not > pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not > pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o'. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 14:42:21 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:42:21 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <20000810141724.28531.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > From: James Smith > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 07:17:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > > The"o" in "iron" is silent?? > > --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: >>> As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", >> "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", >>> , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", >> "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", >>> "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? >> >> A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with >> a silent letter >> for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for >> q? I don't >> really remember all of them just now. >> >> Rima > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. > http://invites.yahoo.com/ From db.list at PMPKN.NET Thu Aug 10 15:30:42 2000 From: db.list at PMPKN.NET (David Bowie) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:30:42 -0600 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: : From: Kim & Rima McKinzey : >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", : >"Honest", , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", : >"Pseudo", , , , "busTle", "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? : A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter : for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't : really remember all of them just now. Depends on which letters you count as silent in "sacque". If it's the Q and U, then you've got two birds killed with one highly obscure stone. David Bowie Department of English Assistant Professor Brigham Young University db.list at pmpkn.net http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:49:05 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:49:05 -0500 Subject: survey Message-ID: I seem to recall Vickie Neufeld telling me several years ago that there was some sort of study and that users rarely used a dictionary for anything but guidance in spelling a word. Bob Wachal From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 10 15:59:28 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 11:59:28 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:42 AM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Not any Americans- but the Poles have a their own version of Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man, "Jestem I Ron Man" - so I know hundreds of ESL students who say that way. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sagehen at SLIC.COM Thu Aug 10 16:04:01 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:04:01 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob Haas writes: >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest & Northeast. The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) A.Murie From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Thu Aug 10 16:01:13 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:01:13 -0400 Subject: Hyphenation Message-ID: I think Barbara's fourth method ought to be dubbed "computerese". I see it frequently in poorly edited newspapers. The writers compose on computers. To save space, they just break the word at whatever place they're at when they run out of space at the end of a line. A corollary is the computer-composed piece that doesn't break words. The result is a large blank space at the end of a line because they next word is too large for the space available. Bob Barbara Need wrote: > > Would that it were so. I have seen some much BAD hyphenation in the > newspapers and books (even Harry Potter!), with biking, for example, > hyphenated between just about any two letters, or don't hyphenated between > the o and the n. > > This is clearly a fourth method (hit-or-miss!). From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 16:26:48 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:26:48 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in [ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = glottal stop) At 12:04 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: > Bob Haas writes: > >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces > >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > >Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all >my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest >& Northeast. >The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ >two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) >A.Murie _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 16:36:39 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down home." At 03:00 PM 8/9/00 -0400, you wrote: >You know, I find Brokaw damned entertaining, and that's because of his >eccentric speech. (Since I enjoy it, I won't call it a speech impediment.) >He's a fair journalist, and a good bit easier to take than Baba Wawa. But >in defense of even that over-inflated idiot, I still enjoy hearing diversity >on the radio or television. Just because they're network anchors doesn't >mean that they should speak some flawless "standard" English. And how's >about Rather? His speech may be fairly "correct" (oh my god, look at all >the scare quotes), but his delivery is more wooden than the collected >members of the Sequoia National Forest. The best American English you'll >hear on a network newscast is from Peter Jennings, a Canadian. I think it's >all part of some kinda plot. > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > > > Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was > > mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal > > stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's > > minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a > > Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. > > > > At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: > >> He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar > >> closure. Maybe this is > >> what some perceive as a speech impediment. > >> DMLance > >> > >> Beverly Flanigan wrote: > >> > >>> What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, > not far > >>> from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > >>> stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > >>> > >>> At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > >>>>> ...In > >>>>> the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > >>>> > >>>> Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech > >> impediment. > >>>> > >>>> Rima > >>> > >>> _____________________________________________ > >>> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > >>> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > >>> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > >>> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > > > > > > _____________________________________________ > > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 16:42:08 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:42:08 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: sagehen wrote: > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all > my life, and use it myself. That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or "hour"? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From sagehen at SLIC.COM Thu Aug 10 16:56:26 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:56:26 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Thank you for letting me down lightly on this. I only realized too late, as the Popeye sound emerged from the silt of memory, what B. Haas intended by his query. -AM Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but >I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in >[ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name >of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" >than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = >glottal stop) > >At 12:04 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: >> Bob Haas writes: >> >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who >>pronounces >> >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? >> >>Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all >>my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest >>& Northeast. >>The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ >>two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) >>A.Murie > > >_____________________________________________ >Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 10 05:14:43 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:14:43 +0800 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 12:26 PM -0400 8/10/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but >I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in >[ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name >of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" >than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = >glottal stop) > I've mostly heard (and always used) ["ay at rn], but the word I've noticed a lot of variation on is "irony". My native N.Y.C. pronunciation (since then, I've been mostly successfully teased out of it) was ["ay at rniy], even though I never really thought there was any etymological connection with "iron". This resulted in a nice metathetic relationship between "irony" and "ironic" ['ay"ran at k]. I don't know if my native pronunciation is listed in any dictionaries as a secondary (or tertiary) pronunciation for "irony"; it would also be interesting to see if others who share my syllabification but were non-rhotic in V_C environments (e.g "Boinie") would have "irony" as ["ay at niy], rhyming with Hermione, as well as rhyming "iron" with "Mayan". larry From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Thu Aug 10 17:17:09 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:17:09 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <3992DB60.48F4FF74@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: Doesn't it come down to how they're pronounced? I can say them as one long syllable (and I believe many do), but in my dialect, they are two because a slight schwa comes into play before the /r/. Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com > -----Original Message----- > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On > Behalf Of Aaron E. Drews > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this > pronunciation all > > my life, and use it myself. > > That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but > counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or > "hour"? From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 17:55:59 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:55:59 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Benjamin Barrett wrote: > > Doesn't it come down to how they're pronounced? Well, I guess being a dialectologist would be pointless otherwise. :-) > I can say them as one long > syllable (and I believe many do), but in my dialect, they are two because a > slight schwa comes into play before the /r/. Personally, I don't think there is a schwa before /r/. I think the schwa *is* the /r/ (well, hooked schwa). For me, and I suspect for many of us two-syllablers, the 'schwa' is an off-glide of the preceding diphthong and the progression from that off-glide to hooked schwa. English doesn't like triphthongs for some reason, on the assumption that hooked schwa is vowel-like. We tend to insert /j/ or /w/ or glottal stops and sometimes /r/ itself (mostly in non-rhotic varieties) to prevent triphthongs. In words like 'fire', 'hour'/'how're', 'iron', the preceding diphthongs might become monopthongs before /r/, but still remain a diphthong because of hooked schwa (this would be the one long syllable). If the vowel remains a diphthong, an off-glide gets inserted before the vowel-like /r/ preventing a triphthong. This produces a (C)VCV string, the medial consonant indicating a syllable break (consider an epenthetic glide in "see it", "say it", "sew it", "do it"). I'm sorry this if this isn't very clear... I've just spent an hour or so trying to explain this to a semanticist. --Aa > > Benjamin Barrett > gogaku at ix.netcom.com > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On > > Behalf Of Aaron E. Drews > > > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this > > pronunciation all > > > my life, and use it myself. > > > > That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but > > counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or > > "hour"? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From einstein at FROGNET.NET Thu Aug 10 18:07:04 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 14:07:04 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Bob Haas wrote: > Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces > "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > I've heard EYE-un quite a lot when I was growing up in NY; here in SE Ohio there's a town Ironton whose native pronounce it ARN-t'n ... no "o" [nb scare quotes] in either. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 19:08:03 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:08:03 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Exactly, as in "I gots to eats me spinnitch, cause the i-ron in it makes me's strong!" Or something like that. Hmm, I just realized that Popeye and Jimmy Durante sound suspiciously similar. The sailor is not deflating in my estimation. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:26:48 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > > I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but > I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in > [ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name > of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" > than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = > glottal stop) From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 19:14:05 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:14:05 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810123633.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: To be fair to Rather, I have noticed that in the past few years (good grief, he's been at the anchor desk for CBS for 20 years) Dan's become a bit more relaxed, but only a bit, as he reads the news. I enjoy watching him on Letterman cause there his Texas really does come out. I wish he offer more of that during news time. Is anyone out there familiar with CBS reporter Fred Graham. I don't know where he's from, but his voice is full o' twang. It's shockingly different from most of the bland voices you hear on television news, but that's what makes it so sweet. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I > usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care > what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a > matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns > me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down home." From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 20:25:13 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 16:25:13 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In fact, I also don't mind listening to Tom Brokaw in interview formats (as in his recent talks about his WWII book), where he's much more relaxed and less glottally-velar in his speech. At 03:14 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: >To be fair to Rather, I have noticed that in the past few years (good grief, >he's been at the anchor desk for CBS for 20 years) Dan's become a bit more >relaxed, but only a bit, as he reads the news. I enjoy watching him on >Letterman cause there his Texas really does come out. I wish he offer more >of that during news time. Is anyone out there familiar with CBS reporter >Fred Graham. I don't know where he's from, but his voice is full o' twang. >It's shockingly different from most of the bland voices you hear on >television news, but that's what makes it so sweet. > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > > > I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I > > usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care > > what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a > > matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns > > me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down > home." _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 10 21:05:11 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:05:11 EDT Subject: Slang & Ski Message-ID: SLANG One theory is that "slang" comes from Norwegian. I went to the National Library today, and I got the e-mail addresses of some linguists. I checked the Norwegian dictionaries with a librarian--I have my doubts about a Norwegian origin for "slang." Any opinions? -------------------------------------------------------- SKI The OED has "ski" (noun) from about 1885 (discounting an early citation from the 1700s) and "ski" (vebr) from 1893. The Association for the Promotion of Skiing (Skiforeningen) was founded in 1883. The ski jump I went to today was made in 1892. According to the Ski Museum: 1843--first ski competition 1850--Sondre Norheim made skis 1867-68--first ski race in Oslo (then Christiana) 1883--Ull Ski Club founded From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:26:23 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:26:23 -0500 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy observed, among other things: > Tracking could consist of having a set of volunteers (perhaps households) > keep a record of when/why/how they use a dictionary over the course of, > say, a year. They could, for instance, be given a worksheet to keep with > their dictionary, in which they note the date, the word, what part of the > entry they were looking for (definition, pronunciation),how satisfactory > they found the information and how easily they found it on a scale of 1-5. It occurs to me this might be relatively easy to set up in conjunction with one of those web-based online dictionaries. Words searched for could be tracked automatically, so human beings would be asked to provide just introspective information (a usefulness rating, a few "think-aloud" comments in a text box) ?? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:29:51 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:29:51 -0500 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic Why are these melodies popping into my head? "silent L, silent L..." "no-L, no-L..." (I'm sorry.) mk _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:52:26 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:52:26 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The L you say! (anon.) --On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 5:29 PM -0500 Mai Kuha wrote: > > Why are these melodies popping into my head? > "silent L, silent L..." > "no-L, no-L..." > (I'm sorry.) > mk **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 11 02:33:46 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:33:46 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Do you mean 2 syllables? Or do you mean pronounced as the cartoon character? I have a 2 syllable pron, but it's I @rn - not the I r at n I think Popeye used. Rima From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Fri Aug 11 03:14:27 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:14:27 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Mark Mandel's comment gives me an opportunity to define "system" and explain how our keyless pronunciation system can handle a non-English word like "Skoplje." This may not be very relevant, but "system" is "a form of organization" as in "a system of philosophy; buddy, capitalist, caste, classification, monetary systems; the decimal, immune, merit systems; a computer system for handling a payroll; the pronunciation system of a dictionary." (The User's™ Webster) Since the User's™ pronunciation system is meant for English speakers (I thought I killed or at least scotched "the native speaker" circa 1985 in The Native Speaker Is Dead!), pronunciation respellings are given in anglicized form. This system doesn't fail if its basic principles are adhered to. First we ascertain the common Slavic pronunciation of "Skoplje" from an authoritative source. Yugoslavs may say the word in two syllables, but the English speaker cannot handle the palatalized "l" sound with ease. An acceptable English pronunciation has to be in three syllables, "-lje" becoming "-lee.ay." The first syllable, "Skop-," is heard as either short "o" (as in "cop") or diphthong "o" (as in "cope"). The keyless respelling is then written as (SCOP.lee.ay) or (SCOPE.lee.ay). I would consider a respelling such as (SKOHP.lyeh) as seen in some encyclopedias rather un-English and too abstract for the common English speaker. I hope you find this keyless pronunciation clear enough for Americans, natives and non-natives. Tom Paikeday THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's™ Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca =================== Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Thomas Paikeday writes: > > >>>>> > Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do > you define "system"? > <<<<< > > You have hit the nail on the head. English spelling is so chaotic and > context-dependent that any phonological "system" based on it must fail, . . . > (The example I remember of the last one, perhaps from _Black Lamb and Grey > Falcon_ [or was it vice versa?], was "Skoplje". Can anyone give this a > clear keyless pron for Americans?!) > > A senior co-worker once objected to the symbols I was establishing for the > phonemes of American English: "Surely you can make them clearer so they'll > be obvious to any native speaker." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 11 06:01:08 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:01:08 -0700 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <398ABB840005AC06@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: >From an old-fashioned (how times change!) SPE perspective, it is the most likely solution to posit /r/ underlyingly and generate the [@] phonetically (of course the rules would have to be ordered to create the /ay/ first from underlying tense //i//). [I once proposed a "diaphonemic" generative system to link regional varieties via a sort of shallow-level comparative reconstruction which aproximated the SPE results; it's in the Harold Allen readings.] So Aaron is right in this. From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I'm guessing, without checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? Rudy From JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 11 07:03:48 2000 From: JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR (JIM.WALKER) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 09:03:48 +0200 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I'm guessing, without >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? > For me, a British English speaker (not RP, but non-rhotic), 'iron' and 'ion' are pure homophones. Viz. the Bob Marley song (certainly not an RP speaker, by any stretch of the imagination): "Iron, Lion, Zion", where all three words rhyme. Jim From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 11 10:15:30 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:15:30 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has /hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' (whatever that means) non-rhotic. >I'm guessing, without >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? I don't think there would be retroflexion at all in . In either a one-syllable or a two-syllable parse, the (r) is in rhyme, and cannot, therefore, be realised as [r] ever. In a two syllable parse, the second syllable would have to be /-r at n/ in order for [r] to be realised.... leading to a spelling pronunciation. As for and becoming homophonous: definitely possible, especially in normal speech. In citation forms, you might get a short, lax, back, rounded vowel (upside-down script 'a'.... bloody ascii) for , but that's listed as a secondary pronunciation in my pronouncing dictionary. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 11 14:43:55 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 07:43:55 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] Message-ID: Are these sung in the key of L... or does it just sound like L? --- "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > The L you say! > > (anon.) > > --On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 5:29 PM -0500 Mai Kuha > wrote: > > > > > Why are these melodies popping into my head? > > "silent L, silent L..." > > "no-L, no-L..." > > (I'm sorry.) > > mk > > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * > McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 02:50:02 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:50:02 +0800 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 11 14:39:27 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:39:27 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Rima McKinzey asks: >>>>> The"o" in "iron" is silent?? <<<<< and Robert Kelly reacts: >>>>> I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o' <<<<< Yes, Robert, that latter is what I meant. Thank you. -- Mark From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 11 14:48:50 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:48:50 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday writes, with an unfortunate type of encoding [his lines wrap at this point]-----------------------------------------| >>>>> --------86E2E1A82CEDC765A4473F9B Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Mark Mandel's comment gives me an opportunity to define "system" and exp= lain how our keyless pronunciation system can handle a non-English word like "Skoplje." [...] Since the User's=99 pronunciation system is meant for English speakers (I= thought I killed or at least scotched "the native speaker" circa 1985 in The Nati= ve Speaker Is Dead!), pronunciation respellings are given in anglicized form= =2E This system doesn't fail if its basic principles are adhered to. First we ascertain the common Slavic pronunciation of "Skoplje" from an authoritative source. Yugoslavs may say the word in two syllables, but th= e English speaker cannot handle the palatalized "l" sound with ease. An acceptable English pronunciation has to be in three syllables, "-lje" bec= oming "-lee.ay." The first syllable, "Skop-," is heard as either short "o" (as = in "cop") or diphthong "o" (as in "cope"). The keyless respelling is then written as (SCOP.lee.ay) or (SCOPE.lee.ay)= =2E I would consider a respelling such as (SKOHP.lyeh) as seen in some encyclop= edias rather un-English and too abstract for the common English speaker. I hope you find this keyless pronunciation clear enough for Americans, na= tives and non-natives. <<<<< That works for your dictionary, but wouldn't work for our purpose of speech recognition. With most foreign words we assume that at least some speakers who use them at all will pronounce them approximately as they're pronounced in their source language, and then we try to approximate that pronunciation with our English phoneme set. That creates clusters and syllables that cannot occur in English, and your assumptions, not mentioned above but implicit in the approach, fail because of the difference in our goals. The same would be true for any dictionary that tried to give a closer approximation than your of the source-language pronunciation of foreign words. Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Fri Aug 11 15:24:45 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:24:45 -0400 Subject: Wired? Message-ID: A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him up the way You did." What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean "made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM Fri Aug 11 15:27:46 2000 From: epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM (Pearsons, Enid) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:27:46 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: Random House lists both ['ayr at niy] and ['ay at rniy], as does Webster's New World. No time to check the others at the moment, but I betcha the second pron appears in all or most. And it's mine. Enid -----Original Message----- From: Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU] Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 10:50 PM To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 11 15:41:00 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 08:41:00 -0700 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: larry horn: On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"... i do (or did; in professorial mode i now have onset r rather than nuclear r). "irony" was homophonous with "iron-y", as in "this water has a iron-y taste". arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), a bit older than larry, from a bit southwest of nyc From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Fri Aug 11 16:07:43 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:07:43 -0500 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: Is RP like NE dialects in shifting from r-deletion to r-epenthesis? I don't recall whether an RP speaker would say [kjub@ Iz] or [kjub at r Iz]. As to ['ay at rniy], I have that in casual speech, except that my initial diphthong is [@y] (SE Michigan Canadian Raising). Herb Stahlke >>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 08/10/00 09:50PM >>> At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Fri Aug 11 16:17:25 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 09:17:25 -0700 Subject: Wired? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000811112009.00931ce0@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: As you guess, it's wiring as in internal circuitry. It seems that wiring usually refers to the brain and/or nervous system. Check out these citations (search for wired): http://nuitari.serv.net/geek/essays/obsessions.html http://www.northheartland.org/1999/051699m.htm http://www.e-democracy.org/mn-politics-archive/9711/2618.html I don't have time to check for definitive citations, but these were found from AltaVista by searching for "how we're wired" (using the quotation marks). Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com -----Original Message----- Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 8:25 AM A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him up the way You did." What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean "made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Fri Aug 11 17:36:25 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:36:25 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I-ron. I myself say I- at rn > From: Kim & Rima McKinzey > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:33:46 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > >> Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >> "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > > Do you mean 2 syllables? Or do you mean pronounced as the cartoon > character? I have a 2 syllable pron, but it's I @rn - not the I r at n > I think Popeye used. > > Rima From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 11 19:01:55 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:01:55 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:50 AM +0800 11/8/00, Laurence Horn wrote: >As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as >underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard >alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r >is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). You have to take a theoretical step back to the structuralists, but incorporate autosegmental notions. What Giegerich (my supervisor) has proposed for RP is that /r/ becomes [r] in onset and [@] in rhyme, or [3] in stressed rhymes.... allophones of the same phoneme kind of thing. There is phonetic basis as well as complementarity for this assessment. Intervocalically, /r/ is in both onset and rhyme. By being in onset, [r] is phonologically obligatory (socially, it isn't, depending on the orthography/history). By being simultaneously in the rhyme, any changes like centring diphthongs can be accounted for. The most important thing I've discovered is to stop calling it 'intervocallic' and call it 'ambisyllabic'... (same with American flapping). This accounts for word-final, pre-vocalic r. It also accounts for a-historic r. At 11:07 AM -0500 11/8/00, Herb Stahlke wrote: >Is RP like NE dialects in shifting from r-deletion to r-epenthesis? I >don't recall whether an RP speaker would say [kjub@ Iz] or [kjub at r Iz]. Neither. In fact, I doubt there ever was actual deletion (and therefore no shift to epenthesis). Instead, [r] (official IPA alveolar trill)(archaic Scots) became an alveolar retroflex approximant (modern Irish English), then the retroflex loosened up a bit (American), then loosened up a bit more (non-rhotic England). Somewhere in that progression, /r/ went from a consonant to a glide, and a glide becomes a vowel in coda, and being a vowel, all sorts of phonotactics get involved. In fact, I believe, that pretty much the same thing happened in proto-American English. That is /r/ became a glide and is now realised as a vowel in codas (borrowed from Khan 1976). We just happened to keep our tongues bunched up a little more, preventing a merger of /r/ and /@/. What I'm saying is that the difference between non-rhoticity and rhoticity (as it is realised in American English) isn't all that great. In both groups /r/ is a consonant in onset but a vowel-like segment in rhymes. The difference is the actual articulation of the rhyme segment. This is where traditional definitions of rhotic and non-rhotic begin to get a bit fuzzy, and me calling RP underlyingly non-rhotic was based on the traditional definition. And yes, it is [kjub at r Iz]. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Fri Aug 11 19:34:06 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:34:06 -0500 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic except in environments that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" DMLance "Aaron E. Drews" wrote: > > > > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to > >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be > >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > > I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the > like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has > /hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' > (whatever that means) non-rhotic. > > >I'm guessing, without > >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the > >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? > > I don't think there would be retroflexion at all in . In either > a one-syllable or a two-syllable parse, the (r) is in rhyme, and > cannot, therefore, be realised as [r] ever. In a two syllable parse, > the second syllable would have to be /-r at n/ in order for [r] to be > realised.... leading to a spelling pronunciation. > > As for and becoming homophonous: definitely possible, > especially in normal speech. In citation forms, you might get a > short, lax, back, rounded vowel (upside-down script 'a'.... bloody > ascii) for , but that's listed as a secondary pronunciation in > my pronouncing dictionary. > > -- > ________________________________________________________________________ > Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh > http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and > aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics > > Bide lang and fa fair \\ // > \\// / > / From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 11 20:25:00 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 15:25:00 -0500 Subject: "monachie": not in OED Message-ID: I was contentedly reading "Reports of Criminal Law Cases, with Notes and References. . . .", by Jacob D. Wheeler, volume II, Albany: Gould, Banks & Gould/N. Y.: Banks, Gould & Co., 1851, when I came upon an unfamiliar word, which proved to be not in the OED nor the DAE. Peter Bogert, a cartman, testified as a witness to a fatal affray that had arisen on Chamber Street, New York, in 1823. Bogert's testimony is summarized, not given verbatim. He said that Ward was driving a cart "upon a walk"; Robinson was crossing the street, on foot. No contact was made, but Robinson, evidently feeling his personal space was being violated by Ward's horse, grabbed its bridle and pulled its head. "When Robinson thus took hold of the horse's bridle, Ward laid hold of his monachie, and threw it at him. [Monachie is said to be a Dutch word, and was explained to mean a fore rung of the cart, to which the lines were occasionally made fast, about three feet long, three inches by two and a half in thickness, at the bottom, and lessening almost to a point at the top, usually made of oak or hickory.]" (p. 124) The last sentence is in [] in the original. Another witness is quoted as testifying: "Heard Ward only say, in reply to a suggestion of witness that a cartman had struck deceased with the rung of his cart, that 'it was not with his rung, but with his monachie.'" (p. 127) I am naturally not familiar with the construction of horse-carts, and I don't understand where the monachie would be attached to the cart. Has it other names in other parts of the country? Can anyone offer a Dutch etymology? Not to leave you folks in suspense: Ward eventually whacked Robinson on the head with the monachie; Robinson was not knocked out, refused assistance, and walked away, but died the next day. There was evidence that Robinson was drunk, other evidence that Ward was "a mild and worthy young man", and so he was acquitted of manslaughter. GAT From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Fri Aug 11 20:12:52 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 16:12:52 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:01 PM 8/11/00 +0100, Aaron Drews wrote: And yes, it is [kjub at r Iz]. I too hear the liaison /r/ in British English. But I have a colleague who adds a final schwar to many words, as in [manIk at r] for Monica and even [j at r] for 'yeah'. He's from Manchester but spent many years first in the U.S. and then in Japan and has been with us one year now. Where does this come from? Is it a kind of hypercorrection toward presumed American English? Wolfram and Schilling-Estes suggest that this happens "in some varieties ... at the end of sentences, as in 'I got the idear' " (1998, p. 39). Has anyone else heard this? in both Brit and Am Eng? And a related case of liaison: Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly trying to suppress his East Tennessee English. But the other day he said something like "we'll need an extry amount of (whatever)," adding a neat palatalized liaison between the two vowels. A breath of fresh air! And finally: I heard that there was to be a segment on NPR last Sunday on the two candidates' dialects. Did anyone hear it? Is it available somewhere? Was it worth hearing?? _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 11 21:00:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:00:15 EDT Subject: Norway noshes Message-ID: Greetings again from Oslo, Norway. This place is a "Scream." Life really feels weird when you enter the Kon Tiki Museum and you hark back to your days on Easter Island. PRINCE OF NORWAY--this vodka drink seems popular here. FJEKBEKK--this vodka drink is also on a lot of menus, whatever it is. PIGGELIN--this vodka drink was also on a menu, whatever it is. TYRKISH PEPPER SHOT--on a drink menu under "shots." TULIPAN COFFEE--don`t know what this is. "SANDEFJORD BUTTER"--this was in quotes on a menu at EGON (a restaurant nearthe Grand Hotel). "BIFFSNADDER"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "strips of beef with pineapple, baby onions, mushrooms and Bernaise sauce." "BLACK AND WHITE"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "one fillet of beef (sirloin) with pepper sauce and one fillet of pork with Bernaise sauce." Off to a fjord tomorrow. Attached is more hell from Abuzz and the New York Times. This NEVER ends. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York City Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:33:16 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2251 URL: From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Fri Aug 11 21:54:13 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:54:13 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <39763D3F.1D32@tc.umn.edu> Message-ID: And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." At 05:43 PM 7/19/00 -0600, you wrote: >In Minnesota, at least in my experience, "barber shop" has been "the >haircutting place for >men," and "beauty shop" has been "the haircutting place for women." >"Beauty shop" seems to be >getting usurped by "salon," and "salon" is becoming "the unisex >haircutting place," which I >think was already suggested. The haircutting chains in Minnesota are >definitely unisex. > >(Incidentally, how about those "haircutting-place" names, eh? For >instance: "Sail on into >Linda's Hair Port," "Hair-itage," and (my personal favorite) "Language of >Hair"--perhaps >unemployed linguists could take up work in "hair as a second language.") > >Anna Fellegy _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 12:18:17 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:18:17 +0800 Subject: Wired? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000811112009.00931ce0@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: At 11:24 AM -0400 8/11/00, Kathleen Miller wrote: >A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him >up the way You did." > >What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean >"made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. > > Maybe he just meant to allude to the fact that Bill Clinton is hard-wired... From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 12:55:17 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:55:17 +0800 Subject: possible citation of possible interest Message-ID: This question came up on another list-- ============ I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) but now derogatory. ============ --and it made me wonder whether anyone here (e.g. Fred, who might consider it as a possible item for the Dictionary of Quotations, if it IS an actual quotation) had come across it. It's a great example to use in class to illustrate meaning change, assuming it's legit. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 13:30:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 21:30:35 +0800 Subject: "monachie" In-Reply-To: <1F4AE991DD1@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: George A. Thompson writes: >[Monachie is said to be a Dutch word, and was explained to mean a >fore rung of the cart, to which the lines were occasionally made >fast, about three feet long, three inches by two and a half in >thickness, at the bottom, and lessening almost to a point at the top, >usually made of oak or hickory.] What I first thought of was the town in Bergen County, New Jersey of (or almost of) this name, but I have no idea for what or whom this town was named. (Monachie is near Woodbridge, NJ and the two towns share some services.) In any case, the official name of the town is spelled MOONACHIE, although this doesn't stop a plethora of web sites from deleting one of the O's (hard to tell which). But then the majority of web hits for "MONACHIE" accessible via google.com involve a (non-rhotic) misspelling of the French word for monarchy. I've always found "Moonachie" quite evocative and poetic whenever I've passed the highway exit for the town, just by Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. Moonachie looks so much like it should refer to the condition of indescribable languor and desolation from which we all suffer on occasion (can I sing you a heartbreaking country ballad about my moon-achie heart?), even though it's doubtless pronounced differently. It is possible, though, that "Monachie" was the original form, whether or not the reference was to a cart rung. At least Northern New Jersey is within the right general area for a place name of Dutch origin, unlike the following... From a web site about Mono (County and Lake), CA: =========== The county is named after Mono Lake which, in 1852, was named for an Indian tribe that inhabited the Sierra Nevada from north of Mono Lake to Owens Lake. The tribe's western neighbors, the Yokuts, called them monachie meaning "fly people" because the pupae of a fly was their chief food staple and trading article. =========== Yum. Doesn't hardly seem to have much to do with George's clipping, though, does it? larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 11 21:00:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:00:15 EDT Subject: Norway noshes Message-ID: Greetings again from Oslo, Norway. This place is a "Scream." Life really feels weird when you enter the Kon Tiki Museum and you hark back to your days on Easter Island. PRINCE OF NORWAY--this vodka drink seems popular here. FJEKBEKK--this vodka drink is also on a lot of menus, whatever it is. PIGGELIN--this vodka drink was also on a menu, whatever it is. TYRKISH PEPPER SHOT--on a drink menu under "shots." TULIPAN COFFEE--don`t know what this is. "SANDEFJORD BUTTER"--this was in quotes on a menu at EGON (a restaurant nearthe Grand Hotel). "BIFFSNADDER"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "strips of beef with pineapple, baby onions, mushrooms and Bernaise sauce." "BLACK AND WHITE"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "one fillet of beef (sirloin) with pepper sauce and one fillet of pork with Bernaise sauce." Off to a fjord tomorrow. Attached is more hell from Abuzz and the New York Times. This NEVER ends. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York City Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:33:16 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2251 URL: From pds at VISI.COM Sat Aug 12 02:28:20 2000 From: pds at VISI.COM (Tom Kysilko) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 21:28:20 -0500 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000811175343.00bf2e80@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 05:54 PM 8/11/2000 -0400, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." I always thought it was: Hare today, goon tomorrow. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 12 19:15:43 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 15:15:43 EDT Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/2000 4:18:47 PM, flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU writes: << Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly trying to suppress his East Tennessee English >> Given the relatively small amount of time that Gore spent in Tennessee during his formative years, it seems to me unlikely that there is much South Midland stuff that he really needs to suppress. From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sat Aug 12 20:05:50 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 16:05:50 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <42.948b176.26c6fc5f@aol.com> Message-ID: >In a message dated 8/11/2000 4:18:47 PM, flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU writes: > ><< Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly >trying to suppress his East Tennessee English >> To which Ron Butters replies:> >Given the relatively small amount of time that Gore spent in Tennessee during >his formative years, it seems to me unlikely that there is much South Midland >stuff that he really needs to suppress.<< Maybe it was the years spent trying to put on the appropriate sound to be thought of as a home boy to his constituents. A. Murie From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 12 22:57:10 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 17:57:10 -0500 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] Message-ID: In my undergrad language and society class this fall, I'd like to assign one reading on language in the gay community, and spend one 75-minute period on the topic. Any recommendations for what to assign as reading and how to spend that time in a way that is likely to do more good than harm? The absence of this whole topic from intro texts and syllabi (at least all the ones I have on hand at the moment) is glaring, and I've never seen or heard this absence discussed anywhere. I hope the reason is that everyone except me has already expertly figured out how to integrate it in the courses they teach. The first time I taught a course on language variation, even less had been written, so in desperation I assigned Barry Zeve's article "The Queen's English: Metaphor in Gay Speech." That was a dumb idea, because I didn't fully understand the article myself. The ins and outs of the closet metaphor were baffling. Having looked at Gregory Ward's bibliography (http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~ward/gaybib.html),I'm considering two possibilities: Graf and Lippa's article in the 1995 "Beyond the Lavender Lexicon..." book, in which they briefly demonstrate differences between two groups of gay speakers; or chapter 4 in William Leap's 1996 book, on characteristics of "conversations that occur outside of gay-centered speech settings". I have this glimmer of a sense, though, that really doing justice to the topic might require subtle shifts or even fundamental revisions to what we (or just I?) normally do in intro courses. To be honest, I'm not willing to do that kind of deep thinking about it right now. Also, I'm not prepared to facilitate a discussion based on a reading that deals with, say, the language of personal ads or of AIDS or has a really angry tone. I probably wouldn't do well, and students might go away remembering only that discussing gay issues was tense. Actually, no matter how nonthreatening the assigned reading may be, I'm worried that I won't react fast enough to any stereotyping comments well-intentioned students may make. That hasn't happened yet, but there is a danger that I'll inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or myths because of lack of experience with facilitating discussion on the topic. (But, in this sink-or-swim occupation, what can one do but keep trying and learn from mistakes?) So anyway, I'm asking for a quick fix (tell me what's the right thing to do!). Thanks in advance for any insights or discussion, and I'm sorry this message is so long. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 12 11:47:56 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 19:47:56 +0800 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 5:57 PM -0500 8/12/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >In my undergrad language and society class this fall, I'd like to assign >one reading on language in the gay community, and spend one 75-minute >period on the topic. Any recommendations for what to assign as reading and >how to spend that time in a way that is likely to do more good than harm? > In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your suggestions look equally germane, although book chapters sometime presuppose discussion from earlier chapters in a way that self-standing articles don't. Anyone else have suggestions? I'll be making up my new syllabus in a couple of weeks for this fall's version of the dialects course, so my and Mai's eyes will be equally peeled.* larry *Can that be right? Do people really keep their eyes peeled? pealed? And why? I can't find either sense in my AHD! From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 00:24:08 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 19:24:08 -0500 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: (...) > In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at > Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one > lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual > orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of > Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender > lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal > Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in Thanks. I seem to have missed the Cameron book entirely. I'll look for it. > _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles > from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender > Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your I was thinking about those two chapters too. The Barrett chapter seemed a little too academic to me, but your students find it manageable then? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Sun Aug 13 05:22:06 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 01:22:06 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: First I have to make my encoding ouchless, which I will do on the Sabbath. Speech recognition is a bit out of my depth, but I will study what is available at the Dragon website and would like to ask you a couple of questions privately. Many thanks. TOM PAIKEDAY ================== Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Thomas Paikeday writes, with an unfortunate type > of encoding > [his lines wrap at this point]-----------------------------------------| > [ . . . ] > That works for your dictionary, but wouldn't work for our purpose of speech > recognition. With most foreign words we assume that at least some speakers > who use them at all will pronounce them approximately as they're pronounced > in their source language, and then we try to approximate that pronunciation > with our English phoneme set. That creates clusters and syllables that > cannot occur in English, and your assumptions, not mentioned above but > implicit in the approach, fail because of the difference in our goals. The > same would be true for any dictionary that tried to give a closer > approximation than your of the source-language pronunciation of foreign > words. > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Aug 13 06:04:15 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 23:04:15 -0700 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <3993DDA5000175E2@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Mai, Thanks so much for bringing up a genuinely significant question for the list, and thanks to Larry for sharing a suggestion. Larry -- it would be helpful to have also at least an outline of your lecture, and, as Mai asked, any suggestions on how you handled the topic. In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. I usually give a small survey assignment, and this time one student chose to do it within the gay/lesbian community, looking for possible regional variation in terminology (or difference in familiarity based on length of residence). It is also easy to bring the topic into the standard part of the discussion of why linguistic differentiations of any type develop or are maintained or lost (Yiddish being a prime historical example). Rudy From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Aug 13 10:20:00 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 06:20:00 -0400 Subject: Missing variable Message-ID: Larry H said: >> While we are able to use Chapter 7 of Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal Hygiene_), << >> Anyone else have suggestions? I'll be making up my new syllabus in a couple of weeks for this fall's version of the dialects course, so my and Mai's eyes will be equally peeled.* larry << Larry et al. I cannot suggest readings for what follows, but may I put to the list an observation, which may be discussed in the literature, re what I see as a gender-related speech phenomenon. Some older (pre-teen and up) girls and women tend to "whistle their Ss"; I do not know a phonetic term for this, but it seems to involve pronunciation of S with the very tip of the tongue positioned dentally, rather than back on the alveolar ridge. Of course, this very characteristic of speech is used mockingly and jocularly in attempts to mimic some gay speech, by comedians and the like, but I am not speaking of that here, although the fact that THIS characteristic is commonly used in this jocular way suggests the association of this phenomenon to female speech. In any case, my further observation is that females who have this speech characteristic seem to be more "traditional" in their use of makeup and fashion -- that is, their use of makeup tends to be more apparent, and their hair and dress more in tune with "conventional" female fashion trends. Clearly, this is a personal observation, not based on formal study, but I wonder if others have noted this, or if there is scholarship discussing it. Perhaps it could be part of class discussions on gender speech differences? Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 abatefr at earthlink.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 01:53:29 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 09:53:29 +0800 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 7:24 PM -0500 8/12/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: >(...) >> In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at >> Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one >> lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual >> orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of >> Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender >> lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal >> Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in > >Thanks. I seem to have missed the Cameron book entirely. I'll look for it. It also has a good chapter on "political correctness" that I use for a different course. > > _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles >> from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender >> Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your > >I was thinking about those two chapters too. The Barrett chapter seemed a >little too academic to me, but your students find it manageable then? > I wasn't sure, since this is a course with no pre-requisites designed mostly for non-majors. I'd be happy to hear about alternative selections. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 03:25:37 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 11:25:37 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Mai, > Thanks so much for bringing up a genuinely significant question >for the list, and thanks to Larry for sharing a suggestion. Larry -- it >would be helpful to have also at least an outline of your lecture, and, as >Mai asked, any suggestions on how you handled the topic. Most of the relevant lecture last time I gave it dealt with the putative attributes of gay male and lesbian speech. We saw that some of the factors associated (with or without reliable evidence) with women's speech (in particular, the lexical and intonational variants defining Women's Language nominated by Robin Lakoff (and Jespersen before her) are also seen as characterizing gay male speech styles. (The sibilant issue brought up by Frank Abate in his recent post would be a case in point.) This led outward to a consideration of the issue of how gay speakers and communities can be identified by such variables; there's a lot less literature on defining lesbian speech communities, but there are a couple of useful articles (Moonwomon-Baird's and Queen's) in the Queerly Phrased anthology that I had students read in last year's Langauge, Sex & Gender class. > In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. I usually give a >small survey assignment, and this time one student chose to do it within >the gay/lesbian community, looking for possible regional variation in >terminology (or difference in familiarity based on length of residence). > It is also easy to bring the topic into the standard part of the >discussion of why linguistic differentiations of any type develop or are >maintained or lost (Yiddish being a prime historical example). > We use "Dialects of English" as a way to lure students in, but we do spend a lot of time talking about the dangers of the term "dialect". Besides, according to today's New York Times Magazine, I am, after all, a dialectologist ;) I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part of the course. I wish we had time to go over some of the issues Lynne Murphy touches on in HER paper about bisexuals and identity in that same (Hall & Livia) anthology, but the Dialects courses moves too quickly. From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:28:31 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 12:28:31 -0500 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike was like: > > (...) In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" > >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly > >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather > >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most > >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced > >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. (...) And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: (...) > I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic > variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although > we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part > of the course. (...) Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:47:11 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 12:47:11 -0500 Subject: /s/ [Missing variable] In-Reply-To: <002301c00510$0b3c7120$4601a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: (...) > Some older (pre-teen and up) girls and women tend to "whistle their Ss"; > I do not know a phonetic term for this, but it seems to involve > pronunciation of S with the very tip of the tongue positioned dentally, > rather than back on the alveolar ridge. (...) This must be just a coincidence (unless a popular entertainment figure with universal appeal is behind this) but I could swear I heard the phenomenon you describe earlier this summer, when I returned after a long absence to the Canary Islands (which is the closest thing I have to what more normal people call "home"). I spent an afternoon with an old friend from high school. She sounded as always, but her 14-year-old daughter and her friend pronounce /s/ with a quality I can't remember hearing before in Spanish. They sounded more front to me, but there was more to it. My friend's 8-year-old son didn't have it, I think. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From michael.gottlieb at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:49:04 2000 From: michael.gottlieb at YALE.EDU (Michael K. Gottlieb) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 13:49:04 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Mai Kuha wrote: > And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: > (...) > > I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic > > variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although > > we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part > > of the course. (...) > > Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead > of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, > a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could > be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered > messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought > up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this > organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. As an alumn of Professor Horn's course, I suppose it's appropriate for me to chime in to say that contextualizing the issues you're addressing under general headings is an excellent way to go, both in terms of how the students will receive you, and how they will organize your lecture in their mind. Addressing the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered messages and meanings" is much better done in a general discussion of pragmatics, etc., as you suggest. I think this will be easier for your student, and easier for you, as well. Professor Horn's class was structured in such a way a particular theory or general trend was the topic of the day. He THEN incorporated and discussed the examples you're bringing up here. The effect was a greater understanding of theory, and a greater wealth of examples for each. This also gave Professor Horn, I believe, the freedom to bring up interesting and current topics wherever he saw fit, which allowed him some room to improvise and work examples brought up in class into his lectures. He would not have been able to do this if he had designated one day to be "sexual orientation day." Of course, if I'm remembering this incorrectly, I'm sure Professor Horn will correct me. However, I guess the lesson then would be that your students are going to reconstruct your course in their memory however they please, anyway. (But I doubt it.) Mike Gottlieb From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 06:09:26 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 14:09:26 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:28 PM -0500 8/13/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike was like: > >> > (...) In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" >> >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly >> >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather >> >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most >> >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced >> >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. (...) > >And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: >(...) >> I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic >> variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although >> we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part >> of the course. (...) > >Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead >of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, >a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could >be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered >messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought >up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this >organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. > Good point. There's another aspect of the issue that hadn't occurred to me before teaching it. We're always trying to bring out the fact that no variety of English (or whatever) is intrinsically the default or unmarked or basic version, although some variants might be socially less or more stigmatized in some contexts. In addition to the standard Labovian type arguments for the logic of non-standard English, a nice way to show this is in dealing with both gender- and orientation-related varieties, where it appears to be straight male speech patterns that are arbitrarily constrained, while the corresponding (stereotypic) female and gay male patterns are defined by the absence of these constraints on expressiveness (e.g. in pitch range over a specified interval). So we're not necessarily dealing with a marked "gay" or "women's" pattern, but rather with the absence of the (stereotypic) straight male features (characterized by monotone, restricted lexicon, etc.). larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 13 20:30:26 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 16:30:26 EDT Subject: Bergen bites Message-ID: Greetings from Bergen, Norway. This was the home of composer Edward Grieg (see the film bio SONG OF NORWAY). NORWAY star Florence Henderson is hiding from me here--maybe she really did like Greg Brady better. "FLO! YO, FLO!" It's raining here, but I'm told it always rains here. -------------------------------------------------------- HEALTH TOURISTS; STOLEN GENERATION The TIMES OF LONDON has been doing a front page series on "health tourists"--people who visit England to take advantage of the National Health Service. The "Stolen Generation" in Australia lost their legal case this week. Both terms have been around awhile--check Nexis. -------------------------------------------------------- NORWAY IN A NUTSHELL The popular "Norway in a Nutshell" tours have been going on here for at least 50 years. I don't know if this is useful for "in a nutshell." An old slogan of Norway appears to have been, from a poster in Flam: "Norway--The Land of the Midnight Sun." Whatever that means. -------------------------------------------------------- O-KE O-KE was a brand of cigarettes that was in a display in the WWII museum on Oslo. -------------------------------------------------------- FOOD & DRINK A place in Flam served these drinks: LONG DRINKS: Fjellbekk San Fransisco Singapore SLing Snow Ball Black Russian Irish Coffee SHOT: Galliano Shot Cacao Shot NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINKS: Furukroa Special Olsen Driver San Fransisco Light Reindeer is served everywhere. "Smorbrod" (open sandwiches) are also popular. I had "lefse" at the Folk Museum. There is also "Vestlandlefse" (West Coast buttered bannock). The name of the country is in the dishes "Norwegian meatballs (kjottkaker)" and "Norwegian almond cake (fyrstekake)." From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 14 10:24:32 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 06:24:32 -0400 Subject: Bergen bites Message-ID: Barry P said: >> An old slogan of Norway appears to have been, from a poster in Flam: "Norway--The Land of the Midnight Sun." Whatever that means. << This refers to the fact that in far northern latitudes, near and around the summer solstice, the sun does not set until very late. At the solstice itself, it is still light at midnight. Frank Abate From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 12:33:48 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 08:33:48 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: I have a question for teachers of dialects: Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the stereotypic? I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at least in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually summarized) seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other types of conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of sorting out the elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, unless he wants to get fired. For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups of women in specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 13:08:57 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:08:57 +0100 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: Joe Pickett asked: > So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly > exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the > variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? Whose stereotypes are being bashed? It's social scientists' stereotype that men try to dominate conversations and women are cooperative, but I find that this isn't the stereotype that my students usually have. When I teach about gender roles and speech, I start by asking the students for their stereotypes of men's and women's speech, and stereotypes I usually hear are things like "women nag," "women gossip and bitch," "men talk about sports". I usually get to gender discussions after discussing cross-cultural communication. I introduce the notion of "solidarity" and "deference" cultures, and ask students whether men or women can be typed as belonging to one of these cultural types, and at least half of them associate men with solidarity (more cooperative) and women with deference (more hierarchical). Rather than trying to discard stereotypes, I try to get the students to look for the causes of them and what value judgments come with them. We discuss how the miscommunication that arises through differing assumptions in the conversation, and how these lead to stereotyping and judgments. Some of it ends up being the kind of thing that you might read in _Ladies' Home Journal_ ("Does your spouse understand you?!?"), but with 19-year-olds who are just starting to play the part of independent adults, it's new to them to think critically about their own communicative styles and how they interact with others'. So, while we do look discuss individual variation and contextual changes (e.g., women physicians' style may be closer to male physicians' than to their women patients), a lot of what we focus on is comparing communication in heterosexual couples to that in same-sex close friendships. And while I point out that we're dealing with statistical generalizations, I also note that you can't do social science without generalizations (and the realization that they are just generalizations). Every time I've taught this, women have far outnumbered men in the class. Often there's only one guy. That's unfortunate. Another thing that disturbs me when teaching this is the occasional one-up-woman-ship among female students. In a couple of the places I've taught, the classroom discussion degrades into "well MY boyfriend does this", "well MY boyfriend does that", "well my FIANCE..." until each of them has proved that she has a boyfriend. (My British students didn't do this, this year. Hurrah! I've found civilization!) Lynne From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Mon Aug 14 13:17:14 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:17:14 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Safire cited this in 1997, "In ''Crazy English'' (1989), Richard Lederer told of Queen Anne's supposed comment in 1710 on seeing the completion of Sir Christopher Wren's magnificent edifice, St. Paul's Cathedral: ''awful, artificial and amusing.'' At the time, that was a royal compliment, with awful meaning ''awe-inspiring,'' artificial ''artistic'' and amusing ''amazing.'' Katy At 08:55 PM 8/11/00 +0800, you wrote: >This question came up on another list-- >============ >I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to >have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: >"How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a >favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) >but now derogatory. >============ >--and it made me wonder whether anyone here (e.g. Fred, who might >consider it as a possible item for the Dictionary of Quotations, if >it IS an actual quotation) had come across it. It's a great example >to use in class to illustrate meaning change, assuming it's legit. > >larry From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 13:24:12 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:24:12 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really interesting. I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? Joe Pickett From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 11:56:59 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:56:59 +0100 Subject: Varieties of English Message-ID: At 7:47 PM +0800 12/8/00, Laurence Horn wrote: >In the Dialects of English course I co-teach Obviously, there are many of you on this list that teach a similar course. I'd like to mention the launch of a new science-fiction novel written entirely in Scots. It is called _But and Ben a-go-go_ and it should be available on Amazon. While I'm leery of classifying Scots as a dialect, Scots is certainly a variety of West Germanic very closely related to English and has a common ancestor in Old English and therefore might be useful in a course such as Larry's. A local review said it might only be accessible by those living in Scotland. I would disagree. I would say it is as accessible as written AAVE, Twain's rendition of slave speech, Chicano English and the like.... once you get used to it. Of course, there are the social implications of having a contemporary piece of fiction in a dialect . If anyone is interested in a review copy for a course, let me know. If anyone is interested for the sake of interest, I'm sure you have a bookmark for Amazon. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF" --Death From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 11:23:12 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:23:12 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <39945528.F88A47D3@missouri.edu> Message-ID: >RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic >except in environments >that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" >DMLance I suppose you mean 'linking' as in phonological sandhi. Traditionally, there has been a distinction between 'linking-r' and 'intrusive-r', the linking phenomenon being in historic/orthographic instances of (r), and intrusive-r being the Cuber is and drawring. And RP isn't consistently 'rhotic' in a linking realisation. It fluctuates because of social stigma. As for SPE, it has a lot going for it, but I don't like the idea that I'm carrying around pre Great Vowel Shift phonology in my head. I have enough problems coping with three (major) varieties of English on a daily basis. --Aa -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 13:37:03 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:37:03 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > This question came up on another list-- > ============ > I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to > have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: > "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a > favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) > but now derogatory. Clearly it couldn't have been James I who said this. Nigel Rees covers it in the June 1996 issue of his "Quote...Unquote" newsletter. Rees says that King James II, among others, is said to have praised St. Paul's as "amusing, awful, and artificial." Rees writes: "Simeon Potter mentioned in Our Language (1976) that 'When King James II observed that the new St. Paul's Catherdral was amusing, awful, and artificial, he implied that Sir Christopher Wren's creation was 'pleasing, awe-inspiring, and skillfully achieved.' ... A request to the Librarian of St. Paul's (the aptly-named J. Joseph Wisdom) failed ... to turn up an original source for the remark." Personally, I find this anecdote puzzling, since one-third of it seems to depend on the word "amusing" being a negative word in contemporary speech, whereas, as far as I know, to call a building "amusing" would be a compliment nowadays. Another way to put my point is that I don't think "amusing" is a word that has changed its meaning much over the centuries. Or, if it has changed its meaning, it has changed in the opposite direction, from a negative signification (see OED, sense 1) to a positive one. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 14:24:18 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:24:18 +0100 Subject: ambanxious Message-ID: This word is used by a Toronto-based hacker in an interview in the current _New Scientist_ (www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion_225117.htm l): "...younger knives really don't have the same kind of balance maybe, and are a little more ambanxious to do all kinds of things. I don't know anybody in the CDC that I wouldn't trust." Haven't found _ambanxious_ anywhere else, but I like it. Also note here _knives_, apparently meaning 'hackers'. But unclear if that's lexicalized, or just building on an earlier statement that "I'm not one of the sharper knives in the drawer when it comes to hacking." The former seems more likely. Lots of interesting underground techie jargon in this interview, if that kind of thing interests you... (CDC = Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker organization.) Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 02:30:54 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:30:54 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <8525693B.004516E9.00@checkout.hmco.com> Message-ID: At 8:33 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >I have a question for teachers of dialects: > >Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the stereotypic? > >I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm >sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. > >It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, >education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make >intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at least >in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually summarized) >seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the >researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is >evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive >conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of >their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of >conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other types of >conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of >sorting out the >elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How >often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a >meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, >unless he wants >to get fired. > >For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups >of women in >specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often >betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. > >So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly >exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the >variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? A lot of this research has been done, and I would expect it to be covered in most careful courses in language and gender. A lot of the literature in fact consists of examinations and critiques of what you're calling the stereotypes. On interruptions, for example, I recommend "Interruptions, gender, and power: a critical review of the literature", by Deborah James and Sandra Clarke (from the _Locating Power_ anthology). Penelope Eckert has played an important role in sorting out the different factors you mention (class, age, social expectation, as well as sex of speaker), as has Peter Trudgill. Unfortunately, I don't end up getting to most of this material in my Dialects courses, due to time limitations. I do try to alert students to the dangers of simplification. Most of these issues, in particular the interaction of the social variables you cite, are better examined in a course devoted to language and gender. larry From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 14:41:03 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:41:03 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, except that his name provides some pretty cool rhymes. (I suppose one could argue that the claim of not knowing anything is in tune with FdS's claim that there are no positive expressions of meaning? And perhaps the chorus is a reference to all the conjugations that students of French have to do?) The lyrics, courtesy of stephinsongs.wiw.org: 6. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure A:002220 G:320033 D:x00232 I met Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this On love he said "I'm not so sure I even know what it is No understanding, no closure It is a nemesis You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids," he said, "so [chorus] we don't know anything you don't know anything I don't know anything about love But we are nothing you are nothing I am nothing without love" I'm just a great composer and not a violent man but I lost my composure and I shot Ferdinand crying, "It's well and kosher to say you don't understand but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!" His last words were... [chorus] His fading words were... [chorus] OK, I'll stop procrastinating and bothering you now. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Mon Aug 14 14:54:44 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:54:44 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? Tom Kysilko wrote: > At 05:54 PM 8/11/2000 -0400, Beverly Flanigan wrote: > >And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." > > I always thought it was: > Hare today, goon tomorrow. > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services > pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 03:01:42 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:01:42 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <8525693B.0049B42F.00@checkout.hmco.com> Message-ID: At 9:24 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really >interesting. >I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? > >Joe Pickett I don't know about Lynne's experience, but I've had similar ones. I once offered a course at Wisconsin called "Women and Language" (this was back in the 70's, when that was the standard term for this area of research) and ended up with 15 or so female students and no male ones (beyond the first day, at which a couple of male students showed up). The next time I taught a similar course it was here at Yale, but as a residential college seminar, which permits the instructor to select applicants and therefore enabled me to make sure I had a mixed clientele. I have taught a regular linguistics curriculum course twice in the last 6 years, now under the title "Language, Sex & Gender". The first time my success in achieving a mixed group was as non-existent as it had been in Wisconsin; I ended up with 18 women and no men. (Again, two or three men showed up during "shopping period" but didn't return.) When I offered the course last spring, three male students stuck it out to the end along with 14 female students, and I think it made for somewhat livelier discussions. I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem, but for whatever reason "gender" in a course title may frighten off some of the male students, and then there's the critical mass problem, although Lynne evidently manages to hold on to the solo male student who doesn't mind being in that situation. larry From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 15:00:45 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:00:45 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <39980834.527EA26D@msdw.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say "scoopin' up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. -- Steve K. From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Mon Aug 14 15:07:13 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:07:13 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: I'm in the "pickin'" camp myself. "Steve K." wrote: > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > > > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? > > Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. > > At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the > Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. > > Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say "scoopin' > up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. > > -- Steve K. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 15:12:53 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:12:53 +0100 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: > At 9:24 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: > >Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really > >interesting. > >I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? > > > >Joe Pickett > > I don't know about Lynne's experience, but I've had similar ones. I > once offered a course at Wisconsin called "Women and Language" (this > was back in the 70's, when that was the standard term for this area >.... > I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem, but for whatever reason > "gender" in a course title may frighten off some of the male > students, and then there's the critical mass problem, although Lynne > evidently manages to hold on to the solo male student who doesn't > mind being in that situation. > > larry My courses have never been 'language and gender' courses (I've never been at a univ that could afford that in a curriculum). I was referring to courses in which I had a week or so on gender issues. At Wits, this course was for Speech and Hearing majors, and if there was one guy, then that was a big deal. (Want to go where the girls are? Become a speech and hearing major.) The Baylor course was a mix of Linguistics students and Education students, and women linguistics students outnumbered male ones by about 4-to-1 (and the Education proportion is even more lopsided). I've taught several all-female linguistics classes that have nothing to do with gender (including syntax courses). My most evenly proportioned male/female course was here last year, in the English Language Studies major. Lynne From Jeffrey.Chase at WANG.COM Mon Aug 14 15:10:21 2000 From: Jeffrey.Chase at WANG.COM (Chase, Jeffrey) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:10:21 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: I grew up in Heaven, I mean Iowa, and we picked as opposed to scooped. I live on the east coast now, and co-workers who grew up here do indeed scoop. JEC Jeffrey E. Chase Wang Government Services "Have red pencil. Will travel." Opinions expressed in this e-mail are solely those of the author, and not meant to imply endorsement by Getronics, Wang Government Services, or the United States Government. > -----Original Message----- > From: Sallie Lemons [SMTP:Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM] > Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 11:07 AM > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: Hair cutting places > > I'm in the "pickin'" camp myself. > > "Steve K." wrote: > > > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > > > > > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? > > > > Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. > > > > At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the > > Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. > > > > Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say > "scoopin' > > up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. > > > > -- Steve K. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 03:33:59 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:33:59 +0800 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:37 AM -0400 8/14/00, Fred Shapiro wrote: >On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > >> This question came up on another list-- >> ============ >> I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to >> have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: >> "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a >> favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) >> but now derogatory. > >Clearly it couldn't have been James I who said this. Nigel Rees covers >it in the June 1996 issue of his "Quote...Unquote" newsletter. Rees >says that King James II, among others, is said to have praised St. Paul's >as "amusing, awful, and artificial." Rees writes: "Simeon Potter >mentioned in Our Language (1976) that 'When King James II observed that >the new St. Paul's Catherdral was amusing, awful, and artificial, he >implied that Sir Christopher Wren's creation was 'pleasing, awe-inspiring, >and skillfully achieved.' ... A request to the Librarian of St. Paul's >(the aptly-named J. Joseph Wisdom) failed ... to turn up an original >source for the remark." > >Personally, I find this anecdote puzzling, since one-third of it seems to >depend on the word "amusing" being a negative word in contemporary speech, >whereas, as far as I know, to call a building "amusing" would be a >compliment nowadays. Another way to put my point is that I don't think >"amusing" is a word that has changed its meaning much over the centuries. >Or, if it has changed its meaning, it has changed in the opposite >direction, from a negative signification (see OED, sense 1) to a positive >one. Meanwhile, on the list at which the query was first posed and through my own investigations on the web, we've come up with attributions to Charles II as well as James I (as in the original post), James II, and Queen Anne, and one for Samuel Pepys, along with one vote each for an unspecified male monarch and an unspecified female monarch. The adjectives in question include various orderings of pompous, monstrous, amusing, awful, and artificial, although always in a series of three. I ended up feeling skeptical that this anecdote reflects anything beyond a courtly urban legend, and Fred's note supports this skepticism. As we know, this sort of extreme variation in the particulars of such stories is characteristic of urban legends, although the "moral" (that words change meaning in radical and surprising ways) is more congenial to us than in most such cases. What it reminds me of is the more contemporary anecdote that pops up here every few years about the lecture (at an international conference or in a classroom) by a distinguished but pompous professor (of linguistics or philosophy) that concludes with the observation that while two negations in some languages cancel each other out and in other languages amount to a single negation, there is no language in which two affirmatives reduce to a single negative, to which a voice from the back of the audience (belonging to Saul Kripke of Princeton, Sidney Morganbesser of Columbia, or someone unidentified) comments "Yeah, yeah" (or "Yeah, right", or "Sure, sure", or...). larry From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 14 15:24:36 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:24:36 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest Message-ID: Further on St. Paul's in London, and who said what. According to the cathedral's website [my added notes in brackets]: Wren's final plans were approved in 1675 [under James II]. Construction took 35 years, but services began there in 1697 [under William and Mary], with completion in 1710 [under Anne]. The website's history section (at least) does not relate the story about the royal quote, but it could not have been James I, of KJ Bible fame. Frank Abate From einstein at FROGNET.NET Mon Aug 14 15:44:00 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:44:00 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: On Saussure, you have to remember that Post-structuralism might just as well be called "Saussure Misunderstood"--he's right up there with Darwin, Einstein, & Heisenberg for supplying a popular concept, in this case Derrida's innovative idea that there's an infinite series of signs (by which he *doesn't* mean Saussure's fusion of a sound pattern with a concept but more like the popular meaning of "word") referring to one another and which are never "grounded" in Reality (completely ignoring Saussure's insistence on the social nature of language, which serves as a corrective to the individualistic conception that is so popular). What the song apparently has to do with Saussure is explicit in the chorus: we don't know anything. Lynne, talk to the people in Theory--you'll hear some fabulous misunderstandings of linguistics. (Marx is similarly distorted to justify our continuing as "culture workers"--but that's another tale...) -- db ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Mon Aug 14 15:52:16 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:52:16 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... At 03:41 PM 8/14/00 +0100, you wrote: >Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with >linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing >off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of >material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on >their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of >Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, >except that his name provides some pretty cool rhymes. (I suppose one >could argue that the claim of not knowing anything is in tune with FdS's >claim that there are no positive expressions of meaning? And perhaps >the chorus is a reference to all the conjugations that students of >French have to do?) The lyrics, courtesy of stephinsongs.wiw.org: > >6. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure > >A:002220 G:320033 D:x00232 > I met Ferdinand de Saussure >on a night like this >On love he said "I'm not so sure >I even know what it is >No understanding, no closure >It is a nemesis >You can't use a bulldozer >to study orchids," he said, "so > >[chorus] >we don't know anything >you don't know anything >I don't know anything about love >But we are nothing >you are nothing >I am nothing without love" > >I'm just a great composer >and not a violent man >but I lost my composure >and I shot Ferdinand >crying, "It's well and kosher >to say you don't understand >but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!" >His last words were... [chorus] > >His fading words were... [chorus] > > > >OK, I'll stop procrastinating and bothering you now. >Lynne > > >Dr M Lynne Murphy >Lecturer in Linguistics >School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences >University of Sussex >Brighton BN1 9QH >UK > >phone +44-(0)1273-678844 >fax +44-(0)1273-671320 _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 15:57:17 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:57:17 EDT Subject: Danish & Woodrow Wilson chef Message-ID: FYI. Barry Popik -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: refdesk Subject: Re: Woodrow Wilson question Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 08:56:56 -0400 Size: 3223 URL: From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Mon Aug 14 15:58:15 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:58:15 -0500 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: How is this trivial? Such a tape would be a great item to own, and to play as mood music during the minutes preceding class, and maybe to hand out to prospective students at pick-your-major-type fairs where physicists get to do all the fun demos. (But how to deal with the copyright issue?) Two more ideas, which I think actually don't have much to do with language, but superficially seem to: Laurie Anderson's "Language is a Virus" and Suzanne Vega has one with the words "if language were liquid, it'd be rushing in". -Mai On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with > linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing > off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of > material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on > their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of > Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, (...) _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Mon Aug 14 16:07:16 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:07:16 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:30 AM 8/14/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 8:33 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >>I have a question for teachers of dialects: >> >>Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the >>stereotypic? >> >>I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm >>sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. >> >>It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, >>education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make >>intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at >>least >>in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually >>summarized) >>seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the >>researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is >>evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive >>conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of >>their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of >>conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other >>types of >>conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of >>sorting out the >>elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How >>often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a >>meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, >>unless he wants >>to get fired. >> >>For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups >>of women in >>specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often >>betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. >> >>So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject >>chiefly >>exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the >>variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? > >A lot of this research has been done, and I would expect it to be >covered in most careful courses in language and gender. A lot of the >literature in fact consists of examinations and critiques of what >you're calling the stereotypes. On interruptions, for example, I >recommend "Interruptions, gender, and power: a critical review of >the literature", by Deborah James and Sandra Clarke (from the >_Locating Power_ anthology). Penelope Eckert has played an important >role in sorting out the different factors you mention (class, age, >social expectation, as well as sex of speaker), as has Peter >Trudgill. Unfortunately, I don't end up getting to most of this >material in my Dialects courses, due to time limitations. I do try >to alert students to the dangers of simplification. Most of these >issues, in particular the interaction of the social variables you >cite, are better examined in a course devoted to language and gender. > >larry I've taught a course called "The Language of Women and Men" for years and have recently found Jennifer Coates' _Women, Men and Language_ (Longman, 2nd ed. 1993) to be a balanced textbook, cognizant of the sociolinguistic research of Eckert et al. She also has a big fat anthology, _Language and Gender: A Reader_ (Blackwell, 1998) which is excellent--with cross-linguistic, cross-ethnic, cross-age, cross-social groups articles, plus several theoretical pieces. (The size and price nearly killed my students, but it's worth both.) A brand new book I just received also looks good: _Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse_, ed. Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton (Oxford UP, 1999). On attracting men into the course, I too have a hard time, though about 1/3 of my last class was male. They tend to be skeptical and even antagonistic, but this is good for the women in the class, who need to have their own stereotypes challenged. I also agree with Larry that it's very frustrating to try to deal with these complex issues in one or two days in my Sociolinguistics or Language in America class. We have another undergrad course, Language and Culture, where we can give it a bit more time. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 16:19:52 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:19:52 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to rhyme... Lynne From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 16:17:23 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:17:23 EDT Subject: Bergen bits--continued Message-ID: Greetings again from Bergen, from a strange keyboard. I thought that I remembered Land of the Midnight Sun somewhere else, but I was probably thinking about Land of the Rising Sun. ICE COFFEE Spotted once. Also spotted were CAPPUCINO and EXPRESSO. No wonder no one can spell anything. RUSSIAN CRAB ALASKAN KING CRAB comes from Russia and is called this. MINIBANK What ATMs are called. MAFIOZA PIZZA Contains tomato sauce, cheese, skinke and bacon. ELDORADO PIZZA Found twice. Contains tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and peppers. GRANDIOSA PIZZA Also found twice. Contains tomato sauce, cheese, and meat. A place called THE SCOTSMAN had these drinks... TOKYO ICED TEA...gin, vodka, midori, cointreau, sour, sprite YELLOW BIRD...Havana Club, banana liqueur, orange juice, sour FJELLBEKK...vodka, aquavit, lime juice, sprite ADVENTURE...gin, amaretto, lime juice, Russchian SLOW COMFORTABLE SCREW..gin, vodka, Southern Comfort, orange juice FLYING SCOTSMAN...gin, vodka, cointreau, banana liqueur, grenadine, sour, battery juice UNDER THE KILT...whiskey, galliano, banana liqueur, crea, lime juice ODDGASM--Girls favorite...gin, vodka, banana liqueur, sour, grenadine, Russchian From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 14 15:38:12 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:38:12 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: Tom Kysilko writes: >>>>> I always thought it was: Hare today, goon tomorrow. <<<<< Foo! FOO!!! -- Mark From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Mon Aug 14 16:27:17 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:27:17 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: If we could find a song about Wittgenstein. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000814115129.016a6e50@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: My apologies:) -- Katy ARTIST: Monty Python Philosopher's Drinking Song Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist Socrates himself was permanently pissed John Stuart Mill, of his own free will Drank half a pint of shandy was particularly ill Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day Aristotle, Aristotle Was a beggar for the bottle Hobbes was fond of his dram And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart "I drink therefore I am" Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 16:32:40 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:32:40 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > rhyme... Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 16:38:30 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:38:30 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > > > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > > rhyme... and Steve K said: > Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. As if I shouldn't be writing other things, Lynne From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 04:41:38 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:41:38 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000814115310.016a7e90@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 12:07 PM -0400 8/14/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I've taught a course called "The Language of Women and Men" for years and >have recently found Jennifer Coates' _Women, Men and Language_ (Longman, >2nd ed. 1993) to be a balanced textbook, cognizant of the sociolinguistic >research of Eckert et al. She also has a big fat anthology, _Language and >Gender: A Reader_ (Blackwell, 1998) which is excellent--with >cross-linguistic, cross-ethnic, cross-age, cross-social groups articles, >plus several theoretical pieces. (The size and price nearly killed my >students, but it's worth both.) A brand new book I just received also >looks good: _Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse_, ed. >Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton (Oxford UP, 1999). > For my last go round, I had the students buy Cameron's reader, The Feminist Critique of Language (Second edition), and used some articles from the Coates 1998 reader Beverly mentions; the latter has the disadvantage that most of the articles are idiosyncratically truncated by the editor, so in several cases I ended up going back to the original journals or anthologies to find the missing material. Her selections are very good, but I don't like the expurgation. There's some overlap between the Coates and Cameron but I found that useful; for example, each of them contains a useful critical article on Tannen's _You Just Don't Understand_, and I found it helpful to have students read both. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 06:00:54 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:00:54 +0800 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:23 PM +0100 8/14/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >>RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic >>except in environments >>that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" >>DMLance > >I suppose you mean 'linking' as in phonological sandhi. >Traditionally, there has been a distinction between 'linking-r' and >'intrusive-r', the linking phenomenon being in historic/orthographic >instances of (r), and intrusive-r being the Cuber is and drawring. > >And RP isn't consistently 'rhotic' in a linking realisation. It >fluctuates because of social stigma. Yes, I meant (and I assume DG meant) linking-r, which was why I mentioned such alternations as "the car" vs. "the car is..." rather than "Cuba" vs. "Cuber is". It's only if at least some vowel-final entries DON'T alternate in this way that you could really have an argument for an SPE-style abstract segment that deletes in the absence of vowel-initial suffixes and following words. Actually, it's really a Sapir-style argument, given his account of the abstract /t/ phoneme in that example of /dinit/ (where it shows up in alternations). > >As for SPE, it has a lot going for it, but I don't like the idea that >I'm carrying around pre Great Vowel Shift phonology in my head. I >have enough problems coping with three (major) varieties of English >on a daily basis. > Yeah, they do get carried away a bit. The late Ted Lightner was the best (i.e. most outrageous) exponent of the reductio ad absurdum style of SPE analysis; he related "night" and "nocturnal", and probably "hemp" and "cannabis", by synchronic rules of English phonology. I always had a weakness for the SPE analysis of "right" as /rixt/, not to mention "boy" with an underlying mid-front rounded vowel. But you can buy "car" with a final -r in non-rhotic/alternating dialects, or e.g. Fr. "heureux" with underlying -z, without shelling out for these more extreme cases. Larry From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 18:08:24 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:08:24 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky > instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. There's a trance group called boo maga that has a recording called Under Attack that samples a bunch of Chomsky's political sound bites. There's also a song called Noam CHomsky by Karma Covered Apple. A lot more turned up on my search of song lyrics Chomsky on google, and most of this music is available for download on mp3.com and other sites if anyone's interested. "Noam Chomsky" -- Karma Covered Apple Countin' constellations while you're looking through The microscop-i-pocalypse While speaking mega McMadonna log In industri-al-i-dosages Drive an Instamatic Cadillac Through every sociopolopoly It's all muh-nah* muh-nah monopoly There's no duh-de duh-dee dignity And realistic ???? Fall apart And it seems A li'l paranoid To me. Expecting confrontation plodding into view Through a telescopic catalog While they realign the cosmograph After brief important messages That they whisper into megaphones I hear it's really catastrophical I'm speaking purely philosophical And a circle And a square And a trapezoid You see. Broadcasting live from stations far inside the groove Spinning out the future retrospect The omega McMc alphabet Stepping out, standing invitations On ???? I see the demographic acrobat Writin' elements of artifact The realistic kinds of cul-de-sacs Through the circle Through the square Through the trapezoid. * Pronounced like the first 2 syllables of "monopoly." * With help from Kathleen Kramer. --- Steve K. From jester at PANIX.COM Mon Aug 14 18:35:44 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:35:44 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 14, 2000 12:32:40 PM Message-ID: > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > > rhyme... > > Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." Jesse Sheidlower OED From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 18:42:57 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:42:57 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: <200008141835.OAA09239@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: > > "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine > Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." Ah, but it does, internally: Wittgenstein/swine, just like Descartes/fart --- Steve K. From jester at PANIX.COM Mon Aug 14 18:46:19 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:46:19 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 14, 2000 02:42:57 PM Message-ID: > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > > > Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: > > > > "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine > > Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." > > Ah, but it does, internally: Wittgenstein/swine, just like Descartes/fart Of course you're right. I was looking at line endings only, though I supposed it could just as easily be written: And Wittgenstein Was a beery swine Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel. JTS From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 14 19:16:42 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:16:42 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Can anyone help this correspondent? >>Sirs, >> Of late I have heard some sound bites on the Rush Limbaugh talk show, >>having liberals use the above word (subject) as though every one knows what >>the word means. I have never heard of it. I sent an email to Mr. Limbaugh >>asking if he knew what the definition was and he never answered. >> I would appreciate an answer from you folks. My email address is >>gkrumm at netzero.net >>With grateful appreciation, >>George W. Krumm From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Mon Aug 14 20:53:41 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 13:53:41 -0700 Subject: "monachie": not in OED In-Reply-To: <1F4AE991DD1@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: "Monachie" doesn't sound at all Dutch, and it doesn't appear in my big Nederlands Koenen dictionary (27th ed., Wolters 1981). The only thing close that is listed there is "monachaal," which means monastic. Since the Dutch word for monk is "monnik" (monk), a form with "ch" looks odd. The etymology is "Gr. monachos = alleen, alleen wonend, monnik," but probably it's a later borrowing than monnik, which has to have been borrowed way early, before the High German consonant shift. And in any case all this doesn't seem to get us any closer to a word for a wagon part which has no obvious connection with monks. Peter Mc. --On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 3:25 PM -0500 GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > > I am naturally not familiar with the construction of horse-carts, > and I don't understand where the monachie would be attached to the > cart. Has it other names in other parts of the country? Can anyone > offer a Dutch etymology? > > **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 20:51:05 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:51:05 -0400 Subject: her and Bush Message-ID: "When I speak, you will know my heart" George W. Bush As difficult as it is for me to believe, I just read the acceptance speech GW Bush delivered at the Republican National Convention. More surprising to me than Bush's laying claim to a Democratic agenda of social justice and environmentalism is GWB's use of "her" as a generic pronoun. See the passage below. GW has two daughters, so the pronoun works on a personal level for him, and I suppose that absolves him from making a political point with his pronoun. Usage fans might note also his comparative use of "equally." Does "more" here mean "not quite"? How much can be read between the lines of this speech! Code words galore! And what limits did you test, George? My generation tested limits--and our country, in some ways, is better for it. Women are now treated more equally. Racial progress has been steady, if still too slow. We are learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back. At times, we lost our way. But we are coming home. So many of us held our first child, and saw a better self reflected in HER eyes. And in that family love, many have found the sign and symbol of an even greater love, and have been touched by faith. Joe Pickett From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Mon Aug 14 21:45:06 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:45:06 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: This is an intriguing query. Mind you (all), I'm not about to take up listing to a highly charged, single-minded, political commentator given to diatribe in order to solve this problem. I tried Nexis for the three spellings... Nothing! I tried the Web... Nothing! (Well, one proper noun). A context or two in which the term is used would certainly help. I suspect the subject is politics. But that's just a guess. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 21:22:19 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:22:19 EDT Subject: Bergen bye-bye Message-ID: I'll be leaving Bergen, Norway tomorrow and might be off the internet for several days. This is a last, midnight roundup. The Clarion Hotel offers these drinks: Espresso Cappuchino Cafe au lait Kaffe Calypso Kaffe Advocat Irish Coffee Cafe Grand Marnier Montego Coffee (In OED?--ed.) Two pizza places serve "Peasana" pizza, which is cheese, tomato sauce, bacon, and onion. Peppe's Pizza has a "Pig's Knuckle" (ham and mushrooms), "New York" (salami and onion), and "Stars or Stripes" (ham or pepperoni, half-and-half, or a mix of both). An "Automat" is a parking meter machine, not something from Horn & Hardart. From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Mon Aug 14 21:26:43 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:26:43 -0700 Subject: Bergen bites In-Reply-To: <200008132031.QAA16502@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: --On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 4:30 PM +0000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Bergen, Norway. > > HEALTH TOURISTS; STOLEN GENERATION > > The TIMES OF LONDON has been doing a front page series on "health > tourists"--people who visit England to take advantage of the National > Health Service. The "Stolen Generation" in Australia lost their legal > case this week. Both terms have been around awhile--check Nexis. In a report from Norway, shouldn't that be "stollen generation"? :) **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 14 21:30:02 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:30:02 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Yes, the context is "liberals" criticizing "conservatives." At 05:45 PM 8/14/2000 -0400, you wrote: >This is an intriguing query. Mind you (all), I'm not about to take up >listing to a highly charged, single-minded, political commentator given >to diatribe in order to solve this problem. I tried Nexis for the >three spellings... Nothing! I tried the Web... Nothing! (Well, one >proper noun). A context or two in which the term is used would >certainly help. I suspect the subject is politics. But that's just a >guess. > >Regards, >David > >David K. Barnhart, Editor >The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] >barnhart at highlands.com >www.highlands.com/Lexik > >"Necessity obliges us to neologize." >Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 > From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 15 01:41:09 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 21:41:09 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Sorry if I seem to be making short work of a long letter with many ideas that most testing experts might find useful. Two points I would like to make are, first, that I sort of agree with Lynne that most of those surveys or questionnaires that we are asked to fill out choosing alternatives like "never / occasionally / sometimes / often" as when we have purchased a new car don't serve any useful purpose as far as I can see. They seem too abstract. Secondly, the most telling observation I gathered in 1967 when my employer sent me on a "fact-finding tour" of the Canadian dictionary market was the following from one Prof. Richard H. J. Monk which I have quoted again and again since then and bears repetition, I think. "After 17 years of teaching in the schools of British Columbia and 11 at a university, I have yet to find a student who can make intelligent use of vowel systems or pronunciation keys as they appear in most dictionaries." Some of those who have written here on this subject have come close to the above observation of Dr. Monk, but nothing like the above for its practical insight, brevity, and forthrightness. It has stuck in my mind and proven quite true and accurate all these years. Tracking dictionary use in classrooms was what I did with the help of English teachers in the U.S. in the early 80's. But it was an informal survey and something more thorough, systematic, and more positive than Monk's observation may be what is called for at this time. T.M.P. THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca ============================================================ Lynne Murphy wrote: > > Thinking more about dictionary surveys... > > I've read various studies based on surveys, and I have to admit that when > I read them, I doubt their usefulness. (They're better than nothing, > but...) If someone asked me what I do when I use a dictionary, I doubt > that what I remembered doing would be the same as what I actually do. For > instance, if you asked me if I use the dictionary for pronunciations > never/occasionally/sometimes/often, I'd really be doing no better than > guessing, I think. [. . . .] I'd be particularly > interested in tracking dictionary use in classrooms... > > Lynne From galtatarscaia at YAHOO.COM Tue Aug 15 06:33:54 2000 From: galtatarscaia at YAHOO.COM (Galina Tatarscaia) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 23:33:54 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I am so interested in words derived from the word YUPPIE, will you be so kind to tell in what way I can find these words ? Thanks a lot. Galina Tatarscaia. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail � Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Tue Aug 15 09:59:40 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 05:59:40 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Tue Aug 15 10:20:26 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 06:20:26 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Does you request compounds that contain the word Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. guppie--green yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 15 12:13:55 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 13:13:55 +0100 Subject: coffee and... Message-ID: >From "Doing the Frango" by Andrea Cooper in today's Salon.com: [context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in Illinois. Is this well-attributed? The article's a nice bit of familiarity for those who've shopped at Field's and gorged on Frango mints. Lynne, a distant relative (by marriage) to Marshall Field Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From jester at PANIX.COM Tue Aug 15 13:24:11 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 09:24:11 -0400 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: from "Lynne Murphy" at Aug 15, 2000 01:13:55 PM Message-ID: > > [context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] > When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, > Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she > confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for > me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the > expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > > I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in > Illinois. Is this well-attributed? Yes, and it's certainly not limited to Chicago. In fact in four years of living in Chicago I don't think I ever heard it. DARE has a number of examples from NC, the West Coast, and elsewhere. The best doughnuts in the Northeast are to be had in a store called Coffee And in Westport, CT. HDAS has additional examples from the New York area. Jesse Sheidlower OED From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Tue Aug 15 13:30:03 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 08:30:03 -0500 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Coffee and" is an old slang term. DARE has "1901 in 1954 Weingarten _Amer. Dict. Slang_" as the first citation. See also "and" conj B5 for similar phrases. At 01:13 PM 8/15/2000 +0100, you wrote: >>From "Doing the Frango" by Andrea Cooper in today's Salon.com: > >[context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] >When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, >Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she >confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for >me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the >expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > >I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in >Illinois. Is this well-attributed? > >The article's a nice bit of familiarity for those who've shopped at >Field's and gorged on Frango mints. > >Lynne, a distant relative (by marriage) to Marshall Field > > >Dr M Lynne Murphy >Lecturer in Linguistics >School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences >University of Sussex >Brighton BN1 9QH >UK > >phone +44-(0)1273-678844 >fax +44-(0)1273-671320 > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Tue Aug 15 14:59:41 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 10:59:41 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: I have made a small collection of linguistic songs, and several of them are by Cat (Catherine) Faber. You probably haven't heard of her, except perhaps for Rima, but she's well known in the filk community. (Filk music: genre of music originating in the culture of science fiction and fantasy.) One of her songs, "Yogh and Ash and Thorn", is a takeoff (parody, "filk") of Kipling's "A Tree Song" (whose chorus begins, and whose subject is, "Oak and Ash and Thorn"), using a tune that I believe is by Leslie Fish (a very well-known filker). I don't believe Cat's song has been recorded, but I know I've heard a recording of this setting of Kipling. If anyone is interested I'll try to hunt it down. Cat's "Say Again, Tower" depicts the plight of an exploration starship returning to Earth after a few subjective years and encountering problems with language change. (Time slows down near the speed of light: many years may pass on Earth while you experience only a few.) I'm asking her permission to post the lyrics here. It is on the CD _As Good As Any_ by Echo's Children, which is the duo of Cat and Callie Hills. I thought it was available from Random Factors, a filk publisher (http://www.random-factors.com/index.html), but it's not listed there; maybe it's out of print. The only reference I could find through Alta Vista is http://www.sff.net/people/Julia.West/filk/asgoodas.htm . Also on _As Good As Any_ is "They Spoke With Their Hands", which according to the insert notes originated with an attempt to describe (by analogy) the experience of a telepath growing up in a non-telepathic community. This song is from the point of view of the only hearing person growing up in a deaf village. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 15 16:02:46 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 11:02:46 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: I'll bet the fat boy from Cape Girardeau is just playing around with 'rubbish', one of his favorite words during the few short stretches of time I've been able to listen to him. It's not just what he says that bothers me -- it's the incivility of his personal attacks on all kinds of people. DMLance Barnhart wrote: > Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a > character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that > moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon > card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). > > Regards, > David > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 15 15:59:20 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 11:59:20 EDT Subject: Norwegian Kitchen Message-ID: Greetings from Balestrand. I type these things for over ten minutes, press SEND, then it signs me off because I'd been on too long and what I've written is destroyed. IT'S THESE DAMNED TROLLS! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!!!! IS-TE--Ice(d) Tea in Norwegian. Lipton again sells "Ice Tea." PANDA-BROD--A type of bread, but there are no pandas anywhere here. HAWAIIBURGER--A hamburger with a slice of pineapple. BRISLING--"Sardines" that come from Norway, not Sardinia. BOKBY--A Nowegian Book Town, as one place calls itself. DRAGSTIL--Dragon style church, for the roof decoration. THE NORWEGIAN KITCHEN by Aase Stromstad 57 pages, $16 Pg. 7--lefse. Pg. 13--Open-faced sandwich. Pg. 13--pinnekjott, lamb rubs, dried and salted... Pg. 13--Lukefisk, cod soaked in lye... Pg. 14--gamalost or "old cheese"... Pg. 19--Torrfisk. Pg. 21--Klippfisk. Pg. 23--Prince fish. THe story goes that this dish was first served to a Swedish prince when he was visiting Bergen some time in the 19th century. Pg. 25--Sandefjord butter Pg. 25--Pollack fillets with fried onions. Pollack is usually considered every day fare. Pg. 27--Bergen fish soup. Pg. 29--Gravlaks. Pg. 37--Ptarmigans with cream gravy. Pg. 43--Veiled farm girls. The best time to serve this delicious old time standby is in the fall when Norwegian apples are at their best. (WHERE ARE THESE NORWEGIAN FARM GIRLS??-ed.) Pg. 43--Can't resist. One of many delicious mousses. The name, of course, implies that it is so good that one can't resist helping oneself twice--or more. Pg. 45--Cloudberry cream. Pg. 47--Aquavit sorbet. Pg. 49--Sweet buns. There is nothing more Norwegian than these sweet buns with their strong cardamon flavor. Variations: Raisin buns Lenten buns Hot walls: This is a Bergen specialty. Shilling buns School buns Christmas loaf Pg. 51--Princess cake. Pg. 53--Prince cake. The story goes that the recipe for this cake originally came to us with wandering craftsmen from Austria who settled in Norway. In time it became the cake we know today. It has an accepted place on the coffee table and is often baked at Christmas. Pg. 57--Bishop. Norway's much revered cook and cookbook writer, Hanna Winsnes, who lived in the 19th century, was a woman who enjoyed the good things in life. She also believed in doing well for the "master of the house" and the many guests who came to their home. On cold winter evenings and at Christmad it was always a pleasure to warm oneself with her "bisp" or "bishop" as she called it. (Red wine, orange juice, sugar, orange peel, boiling water--ed.) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 04:14:20 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:14:20 +0800 Subject: Norwegian Kitchen In-Reply-To: <200008151559.e7FFxxf20560@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: At 11:59 AM -0400 8/15/00, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > >PANDA-BROD--A type of bread, but there are no pandas anywhere here. > Might this be marble rye, with dark (pumpernickel) and light rye in large patches? Panda-brod would be a nice name for this. larry From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 15 16:43:11 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:43:11 -0400 Subject: Norwegian Kitchen In-Reply-To: <200008151559.e7FFxxf20560@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: At 11:59 AM 8/15/00 -0400, Barry Popik wrote: >DRAGSTIL--Dragon style church, for the roof decoration. Dragons do indeed appear on the corners and gables of the roofs of a particular medieval style of church in Norway, the Stav Kirke, or church built of vertical staves of wood. The style combines pagan warding off of evil via dragons with the high steeple of the traditional Christian church. We have several copies of these churches in Minnesota. >THE NORWEGIAN KITCHEN >by Aase Stromstad >57 pages, $16 > >Pg. 7--lefse. >Pg. 13--Open-faced sandwich. >Pg. 13--pinnekjott, lamb rubs, dried and salted... >Pg. 13--Lukefisk, cod soaked in lye... >Pg. 14--gamalost or "old cheese"... >Pg. 19--Torrfisk. >Pg. 21--Klippfisk. >Pg. 23--Prince fish. THe story goes that this dish was first served to a >Swedish prince when he was visiting Bergen some time in the 19th century. >Pg. 25--Sandefjord butter >Pg. 25--Pollack fillets with fried onions. Pollack is usually considered >every day fare. >Pg. 27--Bergen fish soup. >Pg. 29--Gravlaks. >Pg. 37--Ptarmigans with cream gravy. >Pg. 43--Veiled farm girls. The best time to serve this delicious old time >standby is in the fall when Norwegian apples are at their best. (WHERE >ARE THESE NORWEGIAN FARM GIRLS??-ed.) >Pg. 43--Can't resist. One of many delicious mousses. The name, of >course, implies that it is so good that one can't resist helping oneself >twice--or more. >Pg. 45--Cloudberry cream. >Pg. 47--Aquavit sorbet. >Pg. 49--Sweet buns. There is nothing more Norwegian than these sweet buns >with their strong cardamon flavor. >Variations: >Raisin buns >Lenten buns >Hot walls: This is a Bergen specialty. >Shilling buns >School buns >Christmas loaf >Pg. 51--Princess cake. >Pg. 53--Prince cake. The story goes that the recipe for this cake >originally came to us with wandering craftsmen from Austria who settled in >Norway. In time it became the cake we know today. It has an accepted >place on the coffee table and is often baked at Christmas. >Pg. 57--Bishop. Norway's much revered cook and cookbook writer, Hanna >Winsnes, who lived in the 19th century, was a woman who enjoyed the good >things in life. She also believed in doing well for the "master of the >house" and the many guests who came to their home. On cold winter >evenings and at Christmad it was always a pleasure to warm oneself with >her "bisp" or "bishop" as she called it. >(Red wine, orange juice, sugar, orange peel, boiling water--ed.) Ah, now here you're making me hungry for good old Scandinavian cooking! In particular, for the many variations on sweet buns. The bishop red wine/juice drink is also called glogg (or is that Swedish?). _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 15 18:06:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 14:06:51 EDT Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT cookbook Message-ID: Greetings again from Balestrand and the hotel's computer. Free computer! Everyone's still at the buffet!...There's a Grieg concert here tonight. The previously cited cookbook was copyright 1999. This other cookbook was in the hotel gift shop here. NORWAY'S DELIGHT DISHES AND SPECIALTIES by Elise Sverdup Aschehoug, 96 pages, 99 krone ($8) 1957, tenth edition 1980, fifth printing 1994 Pg. 9--Arendal Cakes. Pg. 10--Bergen Twists (Bergenkringler). Pg. 10--Polar Bear's Eye (lsbjornoye). Pg. 11--Drammen Cream Cakes. Pg. 11--Fevig Mackerel. Pg. 11--Hallingdal Sour-Cream Bread. Pg. 12--Grimstad Rusks. Pg. 12--Hallingdal Bannocks (Hallingdallefser). Pg. 13--Trondheim Soup. Pg. 14--Aalesund Broth. Pg. 14--Oslo Sweet Soup. Pg. 15--Osterdalen Stew. Pg. 16--Kristiansund Dumpling. Pg. 16--Midnight Sun (Midnattsol). Drat, someone else finished the buffet. Does OED have all of these???? From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 15 21:00:11 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 17:00:11 -0400 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the > expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in > Illinois. Is this well-attributed? In ten years of living in Chicago in various neighborhoods, I never heard it. --- Steve K. From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Tue Aug 15 23:37:25 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 16:37:25 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: Buppie, Puppie --- Barnhart wrote: > Does you request compounds that contain the word > Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie > syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. > guppie--green > yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? > > Regards, > David > > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail � Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 12:07:36 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 20:07:36 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <20000815233725.22560.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: also Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) larry At 4:37 PM -0700 8/15/00, Margaret Lee wrote: >Buppie, Puppie > >--- Barnhart wrote: >> Does you request compounds that contain the word >> Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie >> syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. >> guppie--green >> yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? >> >> Regards, > > David >> From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 16 01:48:52 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 21:48:52 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: bubbie .... black yuppie Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged professional gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie huppie ..... hippy yuppie juppie ..... Another word for buppie nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional puppie ..... pretentious yuppie Rumpie ..... rural yuppie scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing power suppie ..... Southern yuppie woopie .....well-off older person Yappie ... young arctic professional yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person [yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ (electronic edition)!!! Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 15:21:03 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 23:21:03 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:48 PM -0400 8/15/00, Barnhart wrote: >bubbie .... black yuppie that's "buppie", I assume. ("bubbie" is something else again. ) I've come across "guppie" more often than any of these except possibly "buppie" and of course "yippie", which is not a "yuppie" spin-off. Yappie? Yeepie? Scuppie? I'll take your word for it. larry >Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie >dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged professional >gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie >huppie ..... hippy yuppie >juppie ..... Another word for buppie >nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional >puppie ..... pretentious yuppie >Rumpie ..... rural yuppie >scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues >skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing power >suppie ..... Southern yuppie >woopie .....well-off older person >Yappie ... young arctic professional >yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person >[yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] >Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie >Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime > >The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ (electronic >edition)!!! > From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 03:23:41 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 20:23:41 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: i feel somewhat apologetic about asking a slightly serious question in the context of general playfulness... but i've never been quite sure how to interpret spin-off terms like BUPPIE and GUPPIE (both of which i've heard used as actual descriptors, sometimes without any playful intent). are they, like YUPPIE, acronymic? [YUP 'young urban professional', BUP 'black urban professional', GUP 'gay urban professional'] or are they parasitic on YUPPIE, with its semantics *plus* the semantics associated with the B or G that replaces the Y? to personalize this somewhat, there was a time when i was a GUPPIE in either sense (a time when we we young and gay, as cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). i continue to be acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE. maybe GUPPIE and BUPPIE are ambiguous, between a narrower and a broader sense. things like this are not unknown. or possibly vague. it's so hard to tell. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), trusting that palo alto does indeed count as urban and that one course a quarter at stanford still counts as professional From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 16 06:41:43 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 02:41:43 EDT Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) Message-ID: Greetings again from Balestrand. The concert last night was given by Age Kristofferson, the second cousin of Kris. You can't leave Norway without hearing him do Grieg's "Trolls." I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know what Jesse has in storage. More from NORWAY'S DELIGHT: Pg. 16: Raggsteindal Rusks. Pg. 18: Hardanger Bannocks. Pg. 18: Telemark Flatbread. Pg. 22: Dancing Master's Soup. Pg. 24: Nail Soup. Pg. 29: Jansson's Temptation. Pg. 30: Glazier's Herring. Pg. 37: Mutton and Cabbage Stew (Farikal, Traditional Norwegian dish) Pg. 41: "Puss Pass." Pg. 47: Norwegian Lettuce Salad (Bladsalat). Pg. 48: Asparagus a la Skaugum. Pg. 55: Cream Dots (Flotelapper). Pg. 57: Monks. Pg. 65: Aristocrats. Pg. 74: Goro. (Attached is _another_ ABUZZ question for me to answer. Again, this is a question that the NY Times's book CURIOUS NEW YORKER avoided completely. ABUZZ, by the way, has ARCHIVES.) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: The Big Apple Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 22:12:51 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2166 URL: From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Wed Aug 16 11:07:26 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 07:07:26 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky said: >> (a time when we we young and gay, as cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). << The play she wrote is "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay", set in the pre-Depression era, centering on the lives of a couple of college-age rich kids. I was in a high-school production of it in 1968 or so, in the Cleveland area. At that time, in Cleveland at least, I don't recall any confusion or comments over the word "gay". When did the 'homosexual' sense begin to really supplant the older sense in general use? Frank Abate From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Wed Aug 16 12:23:21 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:23:21 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky wrote << i continue to be acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE.>> Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We actually deleted this term from AHD4. It is one of a small number of vocabulary deletes we made. Another is beach burner, what is now called a personal watercraft. You aren't likely to see many muppies riding beach burners these days, or if you do you'd call them something else. Joe Pickett From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 12:41:06 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:41:06 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: <200008160642.e7G6gHS13050@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know > what Jesse has in storage. OED's first use is 1857. Here's an earlier one I have found: 1831 F. W. Beechey _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait_ 335 The midnight sun ... tinges with a bright line all the northern circle. Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 16 12:54:20 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:54:20 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: from "Fred Shapiro" at Aug 16, 2000 08:41:06 AM Message-ID: > > On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > > > I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know > > what Jesse has in storage. > > OED's first use is 1857. Here's an earlier one I have found: > > 1831 F. W. Beechey _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's > Strait_ 335 The midnight sun ... tinges with a bright line all the > northern circle. And here's an earlier one yet, that I had in storage: 1827 R. Montgomery _Age Reviewed_ II. 211 All the tribe by Beazely was outdone, Who made, for novelty, a midnight sun! The purblind cocknies liked this wond'rous spell. Jesse Sheidlower OED From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 13:35:53 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 14:35:53 +0100 Subject: bread and butter pickles Message-ID: Hello again all-- Does anyone have any history on the term "bread and butter pickles"? (This is just for interests' sake, not serious research--don't put yourself out.) The pickles I've bought in a jar here are labelled "dill cucumbers", but they taste like bread and butter pickles to me. I assume that the term is American, since we seem to have many more varieties of pickled cukes than the British do (who seem to have gherkins, and things that are called 'dill' but don't taste like dill). It's not in AHD nor DARE, and my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook gives no indication of where they come from or why they're called 'bread and butter'. Lynne, who misses kosher dills Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 13:33:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:33:51 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: <200008161254.IAA04945@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: Here's still an earlier citation for _midnight sun_: 1787 Joel Barlow _The Vision of Columbus_ 179 Where midnight suns their happier beams display. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Wed Aug 16 13:45:58 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:45:58 -0500 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <20000815233725.22560.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: "Among the New Words" in the Summer 1989 issue of American Speech includes buppie, dink(ie), dumpie, skippie, suppie, yappie, yup, as well as compounds with yuppie. From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Wed Aug 16 13:48:54 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:48:54 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Or could it just be a play-around with the word, rubbish? The truth is not in yhe fat boy. Bob "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > > I'll bet the fat boy from Cape Girardeau is just playing around with 'rubbish', one of his > favorite words during the few short stretches of time I've been able to listen to him. > It's not just what he says that bothers me -- it's the incivility of his personal attacks > on all kinds of people. > DMLance > > Barnhart wrote: > > > Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a > > character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that > > moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon > > card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). > > > > Regards, > > David > > > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > > barnhart at highlands.com > > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 03:21:11 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 11:21:11 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <200008160323.UAA00678@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: At 8:23 PM -0700 8/15/00, Arnold Zwicky wrote: >i feel somewhat apologetic about asking a slightly serious >question in the context of general playfulness... but i've >never been quite sure how to interpret spin-off terms like >BUPPIE and GUPPIE (both of which i've heard used as actual >descriptors, sometimes without any playful intent). are they, >like YUPPIE, acronymic? [YUP 'young urban professional', BUP >'black urban professional', GUP 'gay urban professional'] >or are they parasitic on YUPPIE, with its semantics *plus* >the semantics associated with the B or G that replaces the Y? > >to personalize this somewhat, there was a time when i was a >GUPPIE in either sense (a time when we we young and gay, as >cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). i continue to be >acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i >could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE. > >maybe GUPPIE and BUPPIE are ambiguous, between a narrower and >a broader sense. things like this are not unknown. > >or possibly vague. it's so hard to tell. > I think this is the case with many analogical formations of this type, although the context often does a better job of disambiguating in other cases. Take the "-burger" formative, for instance. Does the generalized "Xburger" denote 'hamburger with X' (or some variant, possibly 'hamburger in the style of X', where 'hamburger' entails ground beef or at least ground meat) or does it denote 'X placed between buns'? The meanings of cheeseburger and pizzaburger suggest the former (they don't denote respectively a piece of cheese and a slice of pizza served on a bun), but that of fishburger (an old term for what is also known as "filet-o-fish") or veggieburger presuppose the latter. The sense in which it's true that Arnold is (still) a guppie is the veggieburger sense, the sense in which it's false is the cheeseburger sense. larry From dsgood at VISI.COM Wed Aug 16 15:42:27 2000 From: dsgood at VISI.COM (Dan Goodman) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:42:27 -0500 Subject: (was linguistic songs) founding fathers on tape. Message-ID: In one time-travel novel, two people of a time a bit after ours listen to a tape recording which includes speech by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. One remarks that most Americans would be surprised to learn that Jefferson spoke with a hillbilly accent, and Franklin with a Boston accent. I suspect the first would surprise linguists also. That the author thinks "hillbilly" means "any and all southern". Would Franklin's Boston accent sound much like a contemporary Boston accent? Dan Goodman dsgood at visi.com http://www.visi.com/~dsgood/index.html Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much. From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 16:26:03 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:26:03 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: joe pickett, replying to my wondering about whether i can be described as a GUPPIE at my age: Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We actually deleted this term from AHD4. It is one of a small number of vocabulary deletes we made. upper end of middle-aged. not so sure about mature, except in age. affluent, for a humanities professor. dubious about ambitious. certainly not trendy. but i guess i'm within range of MUPPIE. unfortunately, MUPPIE loses that significant G. it's also a word i can't believe ever got used nonjokingly. so it's surely a good thing that AHD4 abandoned it. (i just got my copy of AHD4, by the way. these new editions *are* getting heavy, aren't they?) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), who recalls discovering the rev. r.j. lechmere guppy, of trinidad, in a dictionary many years ago From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 16:59:47 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 17:59:47 +0100 Subject: burgers (was: Re: request) Message-ID: Larry says: > in other cases. Take the "-burger" formative, for instance. Does > the generalized "Xburger" denote 'hamburger with X' (or some variant, > possibly 'hamburger in the style of X', where 'hamburger' entails > ground beef or at least ground meat) or does it denote 'X placed > between buns'? The meanings of cheeseburger and pizzaburger suggest > the former (they don't denote respectively a piece of cheese and a > slice of pizza served on a bun), but that of fishburger (an old term > for what is also known as "filet-o-fish") or veggieburger presuppose > the latter. The sense in which it's true that Arnold is (still) a > guppie is the veggieburger sense, the sense in which it's false is > the cheeseburger sense. There's a third interpretation of -burger: 'ground X (between buns)', and the confusing thing is that 'turkey burger' usually gets the 'ground' reading while 'chicken burger' often (this might just be outside the US: UK and SA) gets the 'unground' reading. Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 17:03:43 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 18:03:43 +0100 Subject: guppies and muppies Message-ID: arnold said: > joe pickett, replying to my wondering about whether i can be > described as a GUPPIE at my age: > > Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is > > A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one > considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We could always try to introduce prenasalized (and prelabialized?) consonants into English and call you a "mguppie". (Hanson's top 40 song "Mmmbop" may have planted the seeds of prenazalization in English.) Or you could be a "gumpie", as in "I'm gumpie, dammit." Lynne, mistress of stupid pop culture references From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 17:24:05 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:24:05 -0700 Subject: guppies and muppies Message-ID: lynne murphy, bereft of kosher dills on the sussex downs: We could always try to introduce prenasalized (and prelabialized?) consonants into English and call you a "mguppie". (Hanson's top 40 song "Mmmbop" may have planted the seeds of prenazalization in English.) Or you could be a "gumpie", as in "I'm gumpie, dammit." GUMPIE has a nice geezery feel to it. i'll try and see if i can't encourage its use. as for prenasalization, lots of american speakers already have it, in [mbai] for 'BYE (GOODBYE) and [Nke] for 'KAY (OK). i'd imagine these pronunciations haven't made it into the dictionaries of american english. (i recall geoff pullum's astonishment, and pleasure, when on his first visit to ohio state he heard the department secretary use both of these in a single utterance.) as for hanson, it hadn't occurred to me to listen to them, as opposed to looking at them. but i suppose that eye candy can have other uses. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), tying several old threads on to this drifting one From AAllan at AOL.COM Wed Aug 16 18:02:31 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 14:02:31 EDT Subject: New term: S2B Message-ID: Full text at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2528784.html?tag=pt.excite.cinews..ne2528 784 (- Allan Metcalf) VerticalNet CEO wants to follow AOL's footsteps By Rachel Konrad Staff Writer, CNET News.com August 15, 2000, 1:15 p.m. PT VAIL, Colo.--In his first public remarks since a management restructuring in late July, VerticalNet chairman Mark Walsh showered praise on the company's new CEO--former Amazon.com president Joe Galli. He also introduced yet another online commerce acronym: S2B. . . . . Walsh didn't necessarily simplify VerticalNet's message when he introduced a new acronym today to describe the company: S2B, or supplier to business. Walsh said he dislikes the B2B moniker because it implies a cadre of large companies that use the Internet to demand volume discounts from smaller suppliers. Business-to-business marketplaces typically focus on driving down procurement costs rather than forging relationships with suppliers, he said. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 16 17:57:44 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 13:57:44 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Laurence Horn writes: >>>>> I've come across "guppie" more often than any of these except possibly "buppie" and of course "yippie", which is not a "yuppie" spin-off. Yappie? Yeepie? Scuppie? I'll take your word for it. [...] {{David}} Barnhart wrote: >[yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] <<<<< Of From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 18:11:07 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:11:07 +0100 Subject: bread and butter pickles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: (off-list) At 2:35 PM +0100 16/8/00, Lynne Murphy wrote: > >The pickles I've bought in a jar here are labelled "dill cucumbers", but >they taste like bread and butter pickles to me. I assume that the term >is American, Personally, I never heard of them. > since we seem to have many more varieties of pickled cukes >than the British do (who seem to have gherkins, and things that are >called 'dill' but don't taste like dill). Yeah, but they pickle *everything* here. > >Lynne, who misses kosher dills You might want to try an 'ethnic' shop. I don't know if there are any in Brighton, but the next time you're in London you might want to try. Here in Edinburgh, we have a place called Valvona & Crolla that sells kosher dills, amongst a plethora of other things (I vaguely remember some Hebraic script on the jar, to boot). I'm sure there's some place like that in your neck of the woods. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 07:05:52 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:05:52 +0800 Subject: Fwd: Re: request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ah. I \thought/ that's what you meant by "Of", but I wasn't sure. This ellipsis stuff can be tricky. L At 2:52 PM -0400 8/16/00, Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com wrote: >I blew it. I started to say something like "Of course, Barnhart didn't say >'yippie' was a spinoff of 'yuppie', but rather that the reverse may have >been true." Then I decided that that wasn't worth pointing out and tried to >abort the message, but wound up sending it instead. Bleah. Sorry. > >-- Mark > > > > >Laurence Horn on 08/16/2000 02:29:44 AM > >To: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM >cc: >Subject: Fwd: Re: request > > >Of? Could you expand on that a bit? > >L > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 16 19:03:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:03:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: On 5 Feb. 1992 Nancy L. Dray posted the following song to the LINGUIST List. It appeared in the next day's issue, #3.117, and can be found in the List's archive at http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-117.html#4: Since the topic of Proto-World, etc., has come up once again on Linguist, and apparently some new articles have appeared, I can no longer resist the urge to post the following parody lyrics; they are, after all, designed not entirely as frivolous entertainment but also to comment, albeit satirically, on certain trends and recent publicity. I wrote this last spring to entertain a gathering of University of Chicago linguists (Goodspeed Day, for those familiar with our local customs), and I later sent a copy, along with a brief letter concerning the value and continued vitality of traditional methodologies, to The Atlantic Monthly in response to an article by Robert Wright ("Quest for the Mother Tongue," April 1991) which was part of the last media blitz. Though letter and song never appeared in Atlantic, they did appear in California Linguistic Newsletter (Vol. XXII, No. 2, which along with the previous issue also contained letters written by other linguists). The song will also appear in University of Chicago Working Papers in Linguistics 7. I am indebted to Eric P. Hamp and David Testen for some lines, some rhymes, and much encouragement and inspiration (see additional acknowledgments in forthcoming UCWPL version). I'd be delighted to receive comments, extra verses, and other linguistic parodies if anyone cares to send any. Likewise any suggestions of where this might be published (if it should be). You are welcome to pass this on, perform it, etc., as long as it is appropriately attributed to me and the copyright information and some way of contacting me are included. I would also very much appreciate hearing word of the song's travels--and a thousand blessings (plus reimbursement) to anyone who sends me a tape of this actually being performed! If you would like a nicely printed copy (i.e., including the typographical flourishes I had to take out for e-mail), please contact me. Thanks! Here goes: _The Very Model for Historical Comparison_ (Copyright 1991 Nancy L. Dray) (to be sung to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Model of a Modern Major-General") I have the very model for historical comparison, For reconstructing languages when data is as rare as in The case of pre-Nostratic (or perhaps it's post-Atlantean-- I always have preferred a task whose compass is Gargant'ian); For I know all the mythologic functions Dumezilian, And I can trace our species back to ancestors reptilian; In all, I seek the broadest view, for by my ideology The details are just residue left over from typology. Chorus: The details are just residue left over from typology, The details are just residue left over from typology, The details are just residue left over from typo-polo-gy. Thus for all forms of pedantry I offer up this medicine: The weighty methodology of old we'll have to jettison. To link the tongues of everyone from Hottentot to Saracen, We'll need another model for historical comparison. Chorus: To link the tongues of everyone from Hottentot to Saracen, We'll need another model for historical comparison. The sticklers and the "splitters" sitting in their ivory edifice Must take the blame for having let the Russians get ahead of us, For if they are so quick to pale when some small detail menaces, How do they ever hope to reach linguistic monogenesis? While they're immersed in Lycian and Lydian and Luwian, I've reconstructed 'water' terms ante- and post-diluvian! I simply use the handbooks that the forms are predigested in And waste no time on learning every language they're attested in. Chorus: He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested in, He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested in, He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested-tested in. So many forms share elements (and meanings if you think a bit); Morphology's impediments I set aside or shrink to fit. Indeed I am quite certain (although others seem to vary some) Mine is the very model for historical comparison. Chorus: He really is quite certain (although others seem to vary some) This is the very model for historical comparison. Now some may say we "lumpers" are just megalocomparative, Displaying our propensity for hyperbolic narrative, But who can match our progress, going speedier and speedier-- Just look at the attention we've been getting in the media(r)! Where fainter hearts are loath to tread, that's where you'll find me wandering, Assembling the parallels the "splitting" clan are squandering; I'm keen to bag the languages they always thought akin to none By stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one. Chorus: He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one, He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one, He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into into one. There's Basque and Burushaski, let us not forget Sumerian, Or scratchings unidentified on tablets antiquarian; I let no language go astray--'twould just be too embarrassin' And mar my perfect model for historical comparison. Chorus: He lets no language go astray--'twould just be too embarrassin' And mar his perfect model for historical comparison. Nancy L. Dray Department of Linguistics University of Chicago 1010 E. 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 e-mail: dray at sapir.uchicago.edu P.S. In my letter to Atlantic, I followed the song with this brief comment: I sincerely hope that the "weighty methodology of old" will not be jettisoned, for without this ballast historical-comparative linguistics quickly drifts beyond the reach of attested evidence. Far from being a stodgy or barren enterprise, traditional historical-comparative linguistics has demonstrated that bold innovation is not incompatible with methodological rigor. Indeed, it is the scrupulous accounting for detail that often leads to the most startling, unexpected, and far-reaching discoveries, for the demands of methodology both force and enable one to escape one's own preconceptions. NLD From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Wed Aug 16 19:32:20 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 21:32:20 +0200 Subject: Norway's delight Message-ID: The expression "Midnight Sun" is much older in Scandinavia - e.g. the title of a book: "Midnats Solens rätta och synlige Rum uti Norrlanden" by J. BILBERG, 1695. I suspect that one can find a Latin origin for the term, as the fact that the sun stayed up all night in northern Scandinavia seems to have been known already in antiquity. Jan Ivarsson, Simrishamn, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 17 02:32:49 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 21:32:49 -0500 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve K wrote: >On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > >> True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky >> instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. > >There's a trance group called boo maga that has a recording called Under >Attack that samples a bunch of Chomsky's political sound bites. > >There's also a song called Noam CHomsky by Karma Covered Apple. > Actually, there is also "Old Man Chomsky", which used to be sung (along with a whole bunch of filk songs for linguists) at the UofC's Goodspeed Day festivities. I would offer to post them, but 1) I would have to find my copies and 2) I might not have permission. I believe "Old Man Chomsky" is by John Goldsmith, but I could very well be wrong. And, for the record, John recently wrote, to the same "possibly recognizable tune" (as Nancy Dary's Hamp song, in case you missed the Tom Lehrer (sp?) reference), a song in honor of Kostas Kazasis, who retired this year. Barbara Need UChicago Linguistics From staczekj at T-BIRD.EDU Thu Aug 17 02:51:00 2000 From: staczekj at T-BIRD.EDU (John Staczek) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:51:00 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I apologize in advance for posting this request. Can someone please tell me how to unsubscribe to the LIST? I'm grateful in advance. John From rkm at SLIP.NET Thu Aug 17 07:11:06 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 00:11:06 -0700 Subject: perspective In-Reply-To: <36.a355d15.26cc9e42@cs.com> Message-ID: Hadn't heard this one before - and obviously had to pass it along. Rima >A mom in Virginia was talking with her four year old son. He >asked her why all their relatives from Wisconsin "talk funny" >and sound like their noses are plugged up. > >"They have a different accent," she explained. "Everybody >talks in different ways. To them, we sound like we talk very >slow, and all our words are d-r-a-w-n out." > >His eyes got big, and he whispered seriously, "You mean they >hear funny, too?" From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 17 09:15:09 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 02:15:09 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I thought *puppie* was the offspring of yuppie. --- Barnhart wrote: > bubbie .... black yuppie > Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie > dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged > professional > gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie > huppie ..... hippy yuppie > juppie ..... Another word for buppie > nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional > puppie ..... pretentious yuppie > Rumpie ..... rural yuppie > scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues > skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing > power > suppie ..... Southern yuppie > woopie .....well-off older person > Yappie ... young arctic professional > yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person > [yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] > Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie > Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime > > The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ > (electronic > edition)!!! > > Regards, > David > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From emckean at ENTERACT.COM Thu Aug 17 09:19:14 2000 From: emckean at ENTERACT.COM (emckean at ENTERACT.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 04:19:14 -0500 Subject: The Coiner of DRIB Message-ID: This is to save Barry needless work when he starts taking on Internet acronyms & initialisms. I am not ruling out the possibility of simultaneous independent coinages. Erin McKean editor at verbatimmag.com ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:34:42 -0400 From: lorilynb at mindspring.com To: emckean at enteract.com Subject: Re: Re: DUMB QUESTIONS Erin, Sure! I love words. I also coined the word "weboneer" in a book in 1996 (meaning web pioneer), but no one uses it. But someone DID take the domain name! Lorilyn Bailey emckean at enteract.com wrote: > I cut my email where I asked her permission to forward her email from the PUBLISH-L list to ADS-L. --ERin On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Lorilyn Bailey wrote: > Yes, I invented DRIB ("Don't Read If Busy") several years ago on the PMA > list in response to people who complained about off-topic, humorous, or > less-than-vitally-important posts. If you're in a hurry, you can delete or > read DRIBs later. (And let the rest of us enjoy them.) > > It's my major lifetime contribution to Internet society. ;) It's now used > on other lists as well and included in one or two "net lingo" and acronmyn > sites on the Internet. > > Lorilyn Bailey > GuestFinder.com > and author of "The Little Book of Online Romance" > lorilyn at guestfinder.com > > > >In a message dated 00-08-13 01:56:00 EDT, Bettilu Stein Faulkner writes: > > > >> Someone wrote that lurkers shouldn't worry about asking dumb questions. > >> I've been watching for weeks, and have yet figured out what DRIB > >> stands for! > From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 11:05:56 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 07:05:56 EDT Subject: Hellesylt notes Message-ID: Greetings from Hellesylt, Norway. I've been asked to help the stranded Russian submarine. CNN just reported stuff from Trondheim, where I'll be in a day. I respectfully told Wolf Blitzer that I did submarine SANDWICHES. FJORDLING--a breed of pony popular in the Bordfjord area. GLACIER--I saw one yesterday. My Canadian tourist guide called in a glace-ee-er. Someone on CNN called it a glassy-er. It's a glay-sher to me. SAYINGS OF THE VIKINGS THE AUTHENTIC HAVAMAL 92 pages, 99 krone My favorite Viking saying--"Nice hat, eh? Let's discover Canada"--is not here. "The early bird catches the worm" is sort of here. Don't know what Fred Shapiro has. VIKING COOKBOOK 40 pages, 98 krone, www.touristbooks.com Nettle soup, Rusiian beetroot soup, Forest onion soup, Fried Baltic herring, Nowegian cod, Bilberry pancake, Elderflower drink, Warrior's mead, Balder's beer, Cranberry drink, among others. I probably won't internet again until Trondheim, in about two days. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 17 13:35:55 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 14:35:55 +0100 Subject: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's Salon: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html Lynne, your local Salon addict Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 17 13:40:19 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 14:40:19 +0100 Subject: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: I said: > There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's > Salon: > > http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html > > > Lynne, your local Salon addict And I add: P.S. It's a pretty stupid review, which doesn't understand what linguists do, and probably deserves some letters to the editor. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 17 13:52:48 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 09:52:48 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Cat Faber has generously granted me permission to post here the lyrics of her songs that I mentioned. She says in part: >>>>> Quick news flash--the tune to Oak, Ash and Thorn is given on Digitrad (now www.mudcatcafe.org, I think) as being by Peter Bellamy. Sorry. I would have guessed Fish too; she's done tunes to a lot of Kipling's stuff. I don't think Yogh and Ash and Thorn has been recorded (you know you've been doing this for a while when....). If it has, it's on one of Julia West's Conduit filk tapes, or the new Patchwork CDs by Greg Vose (also of Conduit, but more recently). <<<<< Cat's URL Digi(tal)Trad(ition) is correct. If you want Kipling's lyrics just search on that page for "oak and ash and thorn". Unfortunately the tune is not available there; the page says Recorded by John Roberts and Tony Barrand on Dark Ships in the Forest, Folk Legacy FSI65 Here is Cat's filk of it. Though not a linguist, she's had some contact with our profession! I have printed out a page with the three letters in type as large as I could fit, which I display when singing this song (to non-linguists). >>>>> Yogh and Ash and Thorn TTO "Oak and Ash and Thorn" [words copyright Catherine Faber] Some time between the year fourteen-ought-five and -fifty-one, There was a strange and radical change in spoken English done. These letters all but past recall should not be held in scorn; The rose in May must go the way of Yogh and Ash and Thorn. Yogh and ash and thorn, good sirs, moldering vellum adorn. Here do we see mortality in yogh and ash and thorn. Yogh, you see, resembles a three, a little bit flattened above, And sound denotes so low in the throat as only the Dutch could love. But now is found both letter and sound discarded and forlorn. Remember you are mortal too, like yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) A "b" with a tail, thorn didn't prevail, but though it lost the race, It takes a pair of letters to wear the shoes to take its place. And "a" and "e" an ash will be, when back to back they are borne; Into dark the passing mark of yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) "Vowel shift!" said somebody, miffed, "It's more like a hey or a bransle"* "Letter and sound keep swapping around, and 'hands about go all.'" Oh some were stored and some ignored and some were mangled and torn, Caught up in the rout as vowels fell out with yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) Time must be an enemy, that ever ending brings. Even word-fame cannot be heard, when words are mortal things. Some clever cuss in studying us, some distant future morn, May find us surely strange to her as yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) Rich and strangely words will change in warpage under use, But why in past it happened so fast, gude gohduh ohnlee knoos** We work the sum of what we become from where and how we are born And hold these three in memory: yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus, if desired) *a bransle is a kind of simple medieval ring dance. The word is pronounced "brawl." I have no idea why, but one does wonder... In addition, a "rout" (I hope I have spelled it correctly) can be "the act of running away from a serious defeat" or "a party". Weird, isn't it? :-) **the middle english (Chaucerian english) for "good god only knows" as closely as I can render it. "gude" has a long u, and the k in knoos should be pronounced. <<<<< I don't have the lyrics to the other songs handy at the moment and will provide them later. -- Mark A. Mandel FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 17 14:07:55 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 10:07:55 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Here are the other two of Cat Faber's linguistic filks that I know of. These lyrics are copied from the album insert to the CD _As Good As Any_ (http://www.sff.net/people/julia.west/filk/asgoodas.htm) and, like those to "Yogh and Ash and Thorn", are posted here by her permission. The other and more recent CD by Echo's Children (= Cat + Callie Hills), _Under the Gripping Beast_, is available from Random Factors (http://random-factors.com/). They don't currently list _As Good As Any_, but it may be available. As should be obvious, I am a fan of Echo's Children! -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html ===================== Say Again, Tower (a consideration of the linguistic consequences of time-dilation near the speed of light) Words & music by & copyright by Cat (Catherine) Faber The sky mighty black and the Earth blue and green I flamed out on stellar craft B-17 With never a thought for the future I sought, So here's to the stars and the spacers between (CHORUS) Say again, Tower, the spacers demand; Say again, Tower, we don't understand. Gander your phrase book and try it again And please eighty-six on the slang on this band! Like anyone else with the brains of a bean, I'd read Chaucer and Shakespeare and easily seen How a language could change in a century's range, I just hadn't thought what the changes might mean. With everyone fighting to coin the new phrase The Internet's growth added fuel to the blaze Kids pick up a word they just overheard And spread it worldwide in a matter of days I laughed at the worries that fell on my ears Till the voice of the tower confirmed all our fears, "Say, B-17, how's the verne escadrine?"-- For Pete's sake, I've only been gone twenty years! ============================ They Spoke With Their Hands (originally conceived as a telepath's attempt to explain to a non-telepath what it's like to live with an extra sense) Words & music by & copyright by Cat (Catherine) Faber When I was a youngster, to question, or teach, The dance of our hands was our manner of speech; It was long till I learned that no other could hear The soft sound as the wind touched the curve of their ear. We spoke with our hands and we heard with our eyes, We were rough and silly and gentle and wise But birdsong's a thing no one else understands In a village where everyone speaks with their hands But much as they loved me, I grew in their fears, For I heard around corners their laughter or tears And I couldn't explain, not for all of my care How I gazed on their hearts through no sense they could share. I tried to conceal it, but still I was caught And fear turned to anger; they trusted me not Till I ran from the mob through the cheatgrass and sage Fleeing unseen the bare sound of their rage. I dream of the chance all my dreams to restore Let our hands dance together, build bridges once more But should fear drive out love I will work them no ill Earth be my witness, I miss them still. From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 17 15:20:06 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 11:20:06 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word Message-ID: This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word "Yooper" is discussed. Thought he'd be interested, at least.... Jesse Sheidlower OED From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Thu Aug 17 15:35:39 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 11:35:39 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word Message-ID: And you'll be glad to note that Yooper has been added to AHD4. I wonder who's responsible for that! Joe Pickett jester at PANIX.COM on 08/17/2000 11:20:06 AM Please respond to American Dialect Society To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU cc: (bcc: Joe Pickett/Trade/hmco) Subject: Steve K's favorite word This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word "Yooper" is discussed. Thought he'd be interested, at least.... Jesse Sheidlower OED From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 19:02:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 15:02:59 EDT Subject: Fwd: OED Usage: nauseous Message-ID: I'm away from my books right now, but perhaps someone can help this person with her nauseating query. (Maybe she'll join the ADS, too?). --Barry Popik, in Geiranger -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Sara Stewart" Subject: OED Usage: nauseous Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 12:45:36 -0400 Size: 1645 URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 19:17:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 15:17:55 EDT Subject: Geiranger greetings Message-ID: Greetings from the tiny town of Geiranger, Norway. No town is too small for the world wide web. VILLFINN--this drink has vodka, banana liqueur, and lemon juice. BARKRAKK--3 cl Bacardi, 1 cl Campari, 5 cl citron juice, 5 cl orange juice, ice, orange slice, soda BLYFRI (non-alcoholic)--Sprite, lime, banana. GEIRANGERFJORD SPECIAL--2 cl Bacardi, 1 cl COintreau, 1 cl Galiano, 3 cl citron juice, ice. PARTY DRESSING--I was told that this looks and tastes like Thousand Island Dressing, which is popular here. I've somehow developed a crush on bubbly CNN weathergirl Femi Oke (www.mpce.com/oke.htm)--even turning the channel from Anna Kournikova or Serena Williams tennis matches. Maybe she can help me research "O.K."? From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 18 02:39:12 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 19:39:12 -0700 Subject: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Fabulous! I will definitely pass it along to the a capella group. Thanks. Rima From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Fri Aug 18 09:33:16 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 04:33:16 -0500 Subject: Long!)Re: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: Thanks to Lynne Murphy for writing: > There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's > Salon: > > http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html I have just sent a response to Salon. I've added both the review and my response below my signature line. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! P.S.: Duplication of the Salon review here is for the purpose of scholarly discussion. I believe it constitutes 'fair use' of the copyrighted material, as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. ========= Gavin McNett's review in Salon: =========== "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" The number of living languages is shrinking fast -- but does that matter? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Gavin McNett Aug. 17, 2000 | There's a reference in "Vanishing Voices" to a magazine ad that promises instruction in "most of the world's languages" -- a total of 76. That might seem pretty impressive, except that even the lowest estimates put the number of languages in the world at roughly 5,000. That doesn't include dialects or regional variations; it represents the number of bona fide languages spoken in the world, each as complex and distinct as English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. If that seems hard to imagine, it's because the great majority are local tongues such as Rotokas, Sim'algax and Kurux, used by only a handful of people. (There are, for example, fewer than 500 native speakers of Kurux.) These languages are, "Vanishing Voices" explains, disappearing from the world at an astounding rate -- as many as half might become extinct in the next century. A worldwide trend toward language extinction, according to the authors, has been going on ever since Europeans conquered the Americas and began to spread out across Africa, the Pacific and Australia. The trend has been accelerating in recent decades thanks to the global economic juggernaut -- through the leveling of regional distinctions and the ongoing displacement of indigenous populations, and (not least) through the rise of English as the lingua franca of business and commerce. The field of linguistics believes that the shrinking number of languages is a bad thing, but aside from the fact that it means fewer languages to study, and thus less for linguists to do, there is no consensus as to why it's bad -- or what should be done about it. But Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine are not linguists; they're from somewhat more sanguinary, more activist fields (anthropology and English, respectively). And they've taken up language extinction as their cause, claiming that indigenous languages have vital cultural knowledge encoded within them that's being lost to the world forever. "Vanishing Voices" is well-written and engaging, and it makes you feel that something unique and irreplaceable is being lost whenever a language dwindles into oblivion. The book has photos of the last speakers of several languages, including Briton Ned Maddrell, who took the ancient language Manx to his grave in 1974, and Red Thundercloud, the last speaker of Catawba Sioux, who died in 1996. As a book on the science of language, however, "Vanishing Voices" is a bit wacky. The point the authors try the hardest to make is that indigenous languages are somehow associated with biodiversity, and that their extinction is a symptom of the global ecological crisis. Which might be true if you squint at it the right way: Languages, along with flora, fauna and indigenous peoples, are dying out -- and it's no great secret that geocapitalism is the culprit. But is there a genuine, necessary connection between biodiversity and linguistic diversity? The authors never establish one, but they repeat the idea a number of times, coyly and at odd moments, as though they weren't entirely convinced of it themselves. Even if you believe, as Noam Chomsky does, that the ability to learn and use language is innate, it's quite a different thing to say that languages themselves can be "ecological." It's like saying that since sex is innate and natural, so are strip joints and S/M clubs: The basic impulses behind them might be present in all of us, but the forms in which they're expressed depend on all sorts of complex cultural forces. Yet much of the book is tied together by this slender premise. Eventually, Nettle and Romaine's discussion of language tapers off altogether, into a narrative of indigenous peoples' struggle against the forces of globalization, which is important and makes for absorbing reading but isn't what the book purports to be about. But Nettle and Romaine make a pretty good argument that it's easier in some languages than others to conceive of certain useful relationships among things, thanks to classifier systems that organize words into categories (like gender in French and German or the Japanese system of using different words to count differently shaped objects). In the dying Australian language Dyirbal, for instance, there are four categories for nouns, which reveal subtle shared similarities among the words, as well as cultural judgments about the objects to which they refer. "If some members of a set differ in some important way from the others," the authors note, "they are put into another group. Thus, while fish belong to Class I bayi words, the stone fish and gar fish, which are harmful and therefore potentially dangerous, are in the balan class." There is thus no mistaking, for a Dyirbal speaker, that the stonefish is dangerous. "The rationale for the categorization," the authors continue, "tells us something about how Dyirbal people conceive of their social world and interact with it." Other examples follow, including that of a complex calendar system used by Balinese farmers to synchronize irrigation. But here's the hook: The claim that language operates in this fashion goes against the grain of mainstream linguistics, which holds as an article of faith that all languages are basically equivalent in terms of conveying meaning -- that none is better or more efficient than any other. Linguists today have to reiterate this point a lot: Early language researchers once tramped across strange terrain and called the local tongues barbarous and inferior. Nettle and Romaine, instead, make a good showing at demonstrating that there are questions of better and worse regarding language: A language, or a language group, can and often will be superior to all others in its own natural and social environment. But there's still a long way to go to prove that the noun classes in Dyirbal, for example, make any difference in its speakers' consciousness -- in the way they think about fish or anything else. And if linguistics is right that all languages are equivalent, then even after reading "Vanishing Voices" you're still left with a difficult, even untenable question: If most of the world's languages are dying, so what? - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Gavin McNett is a frequent contributor to Salon. ======= Response by Mike Salovesh, submitted to Salon ======== Gavin McNett's review of "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" fliply opines that "the field of linguistics believes that the shrinking number of languages is a bad thing, but aside from the fact that it means fewer languages to study, and thus less for linguists to do, there is no consensus as to why it's bad . . . " A serious misconception underlies that statement. Linguistics is aimed at understanding the nature of language in general. Many major contributions in linguistic science have been the work of linguists who spoke and analyzed only one language. Conversely, there are many people who handle several languages equally well without knowing anything about linguistics. (Students of linguistics call those people "polyglots", not linguists.) If everyone on earth suddenly started to speak English and all other languages were to disappear, there would still be more work to be done in linguistics than there are linguists to do it. McNett sets up a straw man as a target in place of Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, the authors of "Vanishing Voices". He takes the point of the book to be that linguistic diversity is equivalent to biodiversity, and that geocapitalism is to blame for diminshing both. By saying that the authors are "from somewhat more sanguinary, more activist fields (anthropology and English . . .)" [than linguistics], and in other side shots at the idea of activism, McNett implies that this whole work can be ignored as some kind of activist fantasy. He even tells us that as "a book on the science of language, however, 'Vanishing Voices' is a bit wacky." McNett makes it seem wackier still by pointing to snippets of cultural facts that might be lost if the languages in which they are embedded are lost. There is something curiously interesting in the fact that speakers of Dyirbal, an endangered Australian language, have four classes of nouns, and that the words for nearly all fish fall into a single class. Two kinds of fish, however, are harmful, and the words for those species fall into another class of nouns. That is hardly earthshaking. If (or is it when?) Dyirbal disappears, it would still be useful to know the dangers of the stone fish and gar fish found in the territory where Dyirbal speakers used to live. That vital knowledge could be transmitted in any other language. (After all, "Vanishing Voices", McNett, and I have all passed on that knowledge using English words exclusively.) Suppose that the conceptual separation of gar fish and stone fish from all other fish through the noun classes of Dyirbal were all the world would lose if the language were to disappear. McNett would then be quite right in suggesting that the loss would be no big deal. If McNett had more than the thinnest acquaintance with linguistics and with what linguists do, he might have understood the much more important questions about what we lose when a language disappears. Linguistics begins with description of actual speech events. In the long run, what linguistics tells us about how language works and what language is depends on knowing just what range of behavior is possible in real speech. Linguists aren't free to manipulate or invent ideas and logics any way they choose: they limit themselves to describing and analyzing what real people actually say in some real language. When the world loses a specific language which never was spoken by any large number of people, the loss might put a philosopher in mind of the Talmudic dictum that "who kills a man destroys an entire universe". A dedicated believer in majority rule might not care at all. A linguist, however, is much more likely to think of John Donne and say "any language's death diminishes me". By definition, every language is unique. Part of that uniqueness is found in unique combinations of sounds, unique ways of arranging those sounds into meaningful utterances, and unique ways of slicing the reality of the world around us into significant categories. Those unique properties are what we lose when a language disappears. Once a language is lost, its uniqueness can't be duplicated or reconstructed by any exercise of the imagination. McNett ends his review by asking "If most of the world's languages are dying, so what?" The most important answer is that each loss makes it that much more difficult to understand the nature of language in general. When we lose a language, we lose a valuable and unique handle on the limits and the extensions of what we can know about language. That's why linguists agree that losing any language is a bad thing. -- Mike Salovesh From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 18 11:27:48 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:27:48 +0100 Subject: salon: Ms & vanishing lgs Message-ID: Since Mike Salovesh posted his response to Salon, I'll post mine as well (below). In other Salon news, I've been reading the issues I missed while traveling a few weeks ago, and there's one on attitudes toward "Ms.": http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/07/27/ms/ And readers responded a few days later with: http://www.salon.com/letters/daily/2000/07/31/ms/ Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 My response to McNett's review of _Vanishing Languages_: Gavin McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's _Vanishing Languages_ does little more than reveal McNett's ignorance about and hostility toward the field of linguistics. After proclaiming what "the field of linguistics believes" (as if any field is a monolithic intelligence), he claims that the authors of the book are "from more sanguinary, more political fields." Considering that the most famous linguist in the world, Noam Chomsky, is also one of America's greatest political thinkers, this is a strange claim. Furthermore, the Linguistic Society of America and other linguistics organizations have taken on language extinction as a major (political) issue in the past few years. But what makes it even stranger is the fact that it's false: Romaine is on the faculty of Linguistics and Philology at Oxford. Nettle is an anthropologist with linguistic interests, who had previously authored a book on linguistic diversity. McNett doubts their claims that the loss of linguistic diversity entails the loss of cultural and cognitive diversity, and it is true that some of their claims were controversial in the linguistic mainstream of the 20th century. However, most of the languages that will be lost in the next century are unwritten languages. When they go, they're gone. There will be no written texts or DNA samples through which they can be recovered. The fear that we might lose cultural knowledge (say, a South American grandma's home remedy for skin cancer or a song that puts Shakespeare's sonnets to shame) is as well-founded as the fear that the extinction of plantlife might involve the loss of a potential pharmaceutical. We don't actually know that any undocumented, unprotected plants are waiting to solve our problems, just as we don't know what we'll lose if we lose most of the world's languages. What we do know is that the problem has been created by political and economic imperialism, and those of us who effect and benefit from our own language's dominance should take some responsibility for mitigating this loss--whether by providing support for education in indigenous languages, encouraging bilingualism, or by using current technology to ensure that the languages are recorded for posterity. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 12:02:35 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 08:02:35 EDT Subject: Andalsnes, Trondheim & the bicycle lift Message-ID: Greetings from Andalsnes, Norway. This is from TRONDHEIM, GUIDE 2000 (I'll be there tomorrow, today was the troll wall): Pg. 5: The bicycle lift Trampe So far, Trondheim is the first city in the world with a lift specifically designed for cyclists. (Sheidlower has a mean cycling reputation--ed.) Pg. 55: Vertshuset Tavern The building has been a tavern since 1739. Previously located in the centre of Trondheim, it has now been moved to Trondelag Folk Museum. (...) rommegrot (sour-cream porridge) spekemat (cured meat) On Tuesdays we serve genuine Trondelag klubb, the traditional potato dumplings of the region. (Attached is...is...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 01:29:05 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2194 URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 18 14:39:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:39:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Cat Faber corrects me on the sequence of Echo's Children's CDs: >>>>> Actually, we put out _Under the Gripping Beast_ first and _As Good As Any_ second. Yours pedantically, Cat <<<<< -- Mark From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 18 14:58:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:58:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: The 1992 email address of Nancy Dray, author of "The Very Model for Historical Comparison", is obsolete. She writes to me as follows: >>>>> Thanks for writing me, and for putting my song back into circulation! I'd be delighted if you'd post my updated address on ADS-L as a follow-up, and I hope anyone who responded by sending mail to my old sapir address will resend it. My correct, permanent address is n-dray-7 at alumni.uchicago.edu (this is just an alias; I can set it to forward mail to me wherever I go). <<<<< -- Mark From stevek at SHORE.NET Fri Aug 18 16:30:39 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:30:39 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word In-Reply-To: <200008171520.LAA05869@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a > small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect > on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word > "Yooper" is discussed. > > Thought he'd be interested, at least.... How very cool; I'll have to check it out. (I'm typing at you from Michigan as we speak.) --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 16:32:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:32:50 EDT Subject: Panda Bread & Svele Message-ID: Greetings again from Andalsnes. There is a computer in the hotel again (but this one isn't free). PANDA BREAD--A bakery here serves this. You get a bag that says "Panda Brod" and has the panda symbol of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund). The recipe for the bread is given (in Norwegian). Supposedly, some of the money goes to the WWF. This is probably on the WWF web site, but I don't have time to check. SVELE--The fjord ferries serve this. "The Golden Route" handout has the recipe and states on pg. 25: SVELE Svele, resembling small, thick, sweet "pancakes," are a traditional local specialty, often made, together with coffee, for guests. WIENERBROD--A "Danish" here is called Vienna Bread! TROLL BURGER--One restaurant in Andalsnes serves this. It's hamburger, lettuce, and fries. ELK'S FAVORITE--What my hotel (Grand Hotell Bellevue) calls "forest berries warmed in peppermint syrup, vanilla ice cream, liqueur." POKEMON PIZZA--Ham & cheese pizza, as served on the kids' menu at one place down the block. TARZAN PIZZA--Pepperoni & cheese pizza, from the same kids' menu. From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 18 17:32:28 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:32:28 -0700 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, that as the meaning of words change, people become frustrated and angry that they have lost the means of expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring any bells with anyone? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 18 06:15:30 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 14:15:30 +0800 Subject: changes in word meanings In-Reply-To: <20000818173228.14027.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, that >as the meaning of words change, people become >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means of >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring any >bells with anyone? > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. :) From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 18 19:19:16 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:19:16 -0700 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: --- Laurence Horn wrote: > At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: > >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, > that > >as the meaning of words change, people become > >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means > of > >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm > >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring > any > >bells with anyone? > > > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. :) The quote I'm looking for was brought to mind by the responses of Mike Salovesh and Lynne Murphy to Gavin McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's _Vanishing Languages_ in Salon. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 21:13:48 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:13:48 EDT Subject: Coasteering Message-ID: We discussed several adventure sports last year after the "canyoning" tragedy, but I didn't see "coasteering" in the archives. "Coasteering" is jumping off a cliff, with a helmet wet suit, and boots on. It's a combination of cliff diving and mountain climbing and probably a few others. A Google.com check shows it's existed since at least 1986. I don't have my Barnhart New Words handy. There are a lot of opportunities for coasteering here among the fjords, but I haven't seen it offered. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 21:19:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:19:50 EDT Subject: "Creative Economy" (formerly, New Economy) Message-ID: There's an article on the "Creative Economy" in today's CBS Marketwatch. I spotted it just now on AOL News. The Creative Economy is something just beyond the New Economy. From tcf at MACOMB.COM Sat Aug 19 04:06:49 2000 From: tcf at MACOMB.COM (Tim Frazer) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 23:06:49 -0500 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: What is SALON? ----- Original Message ----- From: James Smith To: Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 2:19 PM Subject: Re: changes in word meanings > --- Laurence Horn wrote: > > At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: > > >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, > > that > > >as the meaning of words change, people become > > >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means > > of > > >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm > > >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring > > any > > >bells with anyone? > > > > > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. > :) > > The quote I'm looking for was brought to mind by the > responses of Mike Salovesh and Lynne Murphy to Gavin > McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's > _Vanishing Languages_ in Salon. > > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. > http://im.yahoo.com/ From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Sat Aug 19 04:41:06 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 00:41:06 -0400 Subject: Mark Mandel/Dragon Systems USA is out of the office. Message-ID: I will be out of the office from 08/18/2000 until 08/25/2000. I will respond to your message when I return... unless it's spam. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 19 06:48:48 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 02:48:48 EDT Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the top story right below the news headlines. (Who reads the JEWISH BAKERS' VOICE I wonder?-ed.) From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 12:41:14 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 08:41:14 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008190649.e7J6nN522198@listserv.cc.uga.edu> from "Bapopik@AOL.COM" at Aug 19, 2000 02:48:48 AM Message-ID: > (Who reads the JEWISH BAKERS' VOICE I wonder?-ed.) Hey, I gave 'em your name! They were _really excited_ to hear about the Jewish Bakers' Voice. JTS From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Aug 19 13:17:08 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 14:17:08 +0100 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: > From: Bapopik at AOL.COM > Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the > top story right below the news headlines. More specifically, it's at: http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/081900oed-profile.html It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... Lynne, who's always had a thing for Michael Palin Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 14:51:12 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 10:51:12 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: from "Lynne Murphy" at Aug 19, 2000 02:17:08 PM Message-ID: > > It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it > compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... I thought, "cool," and then my wife came down and said, "Who's Michael Palin?" Giving rise to some mean thoughts from me. JTS From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 19 16:10:22 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:10:22 EDT Subject: Brain Stack Message-ID: Greetings from Trondheim and a bizarre keyboard. Today´s NY POST has this sports headline... "Brain Stack" gives Hill Mental Powers Glenallen Hill takes the brain supplement pills Cartilade Sport, Brain Elevate, Phosphatidyl Serine, Glutamine, and Tyrosine. Me, I take those Ritter chocolate squares. Does Barnhardt or Fred Shapiro or "Michael Palin" have BRAIN STACK? From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:04:43 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 09:04:43 -0700 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: barry popik announces: Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the top story right below the news headlines. in the northern california edition, it's right under a photo of the melted north pole. just one more amazing event, i guess. so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From gscole at ARK.SHIP.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:47:49 2000 From: gscole at ARK.SHIP.EDU (GSCole) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:47:49 -0400 Subject: "Creative Economy" (formerly, New Economy) Message-ID: Merely a quick note. Some sources credit Ralph Waldo Emerson with "A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence," as found in -Aristocracy-. I don't have that source at hand, so I can't comment; don't know the usage intended by Emerson, nor the one of CBS Marketwatch. George S. Cole gscole at ark.ship.edu Shippensburg University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:48:55 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:48:55 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it > compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... > > Lynne, who's always had a thing for Michael Palin (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become much more interesting with age. mk) _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Aug 19 16:59:17 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:59:17 +0100 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: > (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become > much more interesting with age. > mk) > _____________________________________________ > Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu > Department of English (765) 285-8410 > Ball State University I think you've just insulted Jesse! Lynne From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 16:59:05 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:59:05 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008191604.JAA12372@Turing.Stanford.EDU> from "Arnold Zwicky" at Aug 19, 2000 09:04:43 AM Message-ID: > so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so > over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about > this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish > it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've > become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an > alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to > finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use to modify things that do not normally take modification. There can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of "fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or the like. The positive-rejoinder "so" can be confused with this newer one; for example, I have a quote from _Spin City_ where a beautiful woman applies for a job and says something flattering about Michael J. Fox, and he replies, "You are _so_ hired". This is the new one; it does not contrast with an earlier or implied state of not-hiredness. The earliest example I know of is from 1988, but I'd welcome an antedating! JTS From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 17:06:33 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:06:33 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become > > much more interesting with age. > > mk) > > > I think you've just insulted Jesse! > > Lynne Er, well, let me try this: I haven't, because of a crucial distinction in definiteness expressed by the determiners involved. In using the phrase "a young Michael Palin", the author asked us to imagine a set of similar but, crucially, nonidentical individuals. I suggested that "the young Michael Palin", the individual who is a specific reference point for this prototypical set, had the quality of being eminently unremarkable, a quality not necessarily shared by *any* of the other individuals in the set, as per prototype theory. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 17:09:18 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:09:18 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times/"so" In-Reply-To: <200008191659.MAA15626@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do > believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use > to modify things that do not normally take modification. There > can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of > "fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or > the like. (...) So far, it seems to me that the new SO occurs only after an auxiliary. Any counter-evidence, anyone? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Aug 20 05:07:20 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 22:07:20 -0700 Subject: On gen-X "so" In-Reply-To: <399DFB6F00006FE6@phobos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: As with "way", discussed earlier, the particular frequency and collocations seem distinctly gen-X, but may be merely an evolutionary extension, hard to draw a sharp line between. In some cases, putting "very" after it renders the construction more mainstream, at least to these jaded ears. Rudy From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 20 12:46:39 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 08:46:39 EDT Subject: Fwd: Jesse's book from Word a day. Message-ID: FYI. Someone read the NY TImes article and then my Amazon review of Jesse's book, which stated that Jesse's at the OED and not at Random House. --Barry Popik (I'll tell her to wait for the movie. There is an OED movie, surely...) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Mary Margaret Flynn" Subject: Jesse's book from Word a day. Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 19:40:04 -0700 Size: 2549 URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 20 13:08:20 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 09:08:20 EDT Subject: Appreciation Fatigue Message-ID: Greetings again from Trondheim. I'll be in Sweden tomorrow. -------------------------------------------------------- APPRECIATION FATIGUE I think we're all sick of fatigues. I'm fatigued at Clinton fatigue. The FINANCIAL TIMES, Weekend August 19-20, pg. 24, cols. 1-4, has "appreciation fatigue." The story is: _Japanese find aid diplomacy_ _fails to generate goodwill_ Beijing shrugs off Tokyo's largesse with attack of "appreciation fatigue" -------------------------------------------------------- TRONDHEIM BICYCLE LIFT I saw the Trondheim bicycle lift. It's interesting. It states: The bicycle lift Trampe was opened September 1993. This is the first bicycle lift in the world. www.novit.no/dahls/Trampe/index.html e-mail: jwanvik at online.no From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 20 02:27:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 10:27:35 +0800 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008191659.MAA15626@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: At 12:59 PM -0400 8/19/00, jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > > so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so >> over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about >> this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish >> it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've >> become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an >> alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to >> finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). > >Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do >believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use >to modify things that do not normally take modification. There >can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of >"fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or >the like. > >The positive-rejoinder "so" can be confused with this newer one; >for example, I have a quote from _Spin City_ where a beautiful >woman applies for a job and says something flattering about >Michael J. Fox, and he replies, "You are _so_ hired". This is >the new one; it does not contrast with an earlier or implied >state of not-hiredness. > >The earliest example I know of is from 1988, but I'd welcome >an antedating! > Along with its modifying of non-modifiables (as in not only "You are SO hired" but "You are SO fired", which I'm sure I've heard on Friends at least once), there's also the striking (at least to me) ability of the gen-X SO to take negated adjectives within its scope: That is SO not cool. Needless to say, normal intensifying adverbs (e.g. VERY) can't do this, but as far as I know neither does intensifying WAY (way cool/#way not cool). On another point, at the very end of the wonderful Times profile (just to the right of the facial encounter from--what movis IS it from, can anyone say?), Jesse describes--(or is quoted as describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. Larry From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 20 15:11:39 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 11:11:39 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational > lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and > probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical > items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the > early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own > recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational > lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. If anyone is interested in the term's history, the OED indicates that _disambiguation_ was coined by Jeremy Bentham or his smarter brother, George (alright, nephew). The OED's earliest citation is dated 1963, from the journal _Language_. Here's an earlier one I have found: 1960 Jerry A. Fodor in _Journal of Philosophy_ 57: 503 One disambiguates an utterance by adding to the context of the utterance. Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sun Aug 20 15:48:55 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 11:48:55 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Fred Shapiro writes: > >Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the >sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). Oh, that is SO day before yesterday! A. Murie From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Sun Aug 20 16:23:20 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 18:23:20 +0200 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Sun Aug 20 16:49:15 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 18:49:15 +0200 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: > It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a > singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history > professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary > of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the > turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is > still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Sorry, I got this backward. I meant to write that Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says that the noun went from plural to singular around the turn of the twentieth century. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Mon Aug 21 00:04:28 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 02:04:28 +0200 Subject: Norway's delight - Midnight Sun Message-ID: Here's a quote from the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA: DICUIL, fl. 825, Ireland monk, grammarian, and geographer whose work is important to the history of science and is a testament to Irish learning in the 9th century....Completed in 825, his De mensura orbis terrae ("Concerning the Measurement of the World") contains the earliest mention of Irish hermits having visited Iceland (795), where they marveled at the midnight sun.... Dicuil quotes from, or refers to, 30 Greek and Latin writers as well as to the poet Sedulius, his Irish contemporary. The best edition of De mensura was made by G. Parthey in 1870. This goes to show the the phenomenon was known and certainly got a name very early. Jan Ivarsson, Simrishamn, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 21 01:01:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:01:51 -0400 Subject: Norway's delight - Midnight Sun In-Reply-To: <000a01c00b03$66f95e80$d3a6b2c3@janivars> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Jan Ivarsson wrote: > This goes to show the the phenomenon was known and certainly got a > name very early. You may well be right that the midnight sun got a name very early, but nothing in the Britannica entry you quote "goes to show" that. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Aug 21 04:39:11 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:39:11 -0700 Subject: SO not cool In-Reply-To: <39A0A9050000001D@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Larry, In your fieldwork in TVland, have you encountered any examples of SO VERY (not) cool/1950s/fired ? Rudy From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 21 10:39:56 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 11:39:56 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are In-Reply-To: <002001c00ac3$08d12a80$5306f9c1@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a >singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history >professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary >of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the >turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is >still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Harry Turtledove, in his afterword in _How Few Remain_ refers to the change from plural to singular with regard to the Civil War. Judging from his other novels, I would suspect that he has actually researched this or at least come across appropriate evidence in his research. Although his linguistic facts are sometimes just a hair off the mark. You can probably find him on the web or through his publisher. As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is losing its consistency in practice, I think. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 21 10:46:50 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 06:46:50 -0400 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: Paul et al. I heard Allen Walker Read give a wonderful paper (like all his papers) on "United States" some years back at an ANS or ADS meeting. He was focusing more on the inhabitant-adjectival uses over the years, but may well have touched on the singular/plural thing. I don't know if the paper was published, but I'd check the index for "Names", the journal of ANS, and also American Speech. Frank Abate From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Mon Aug 21 13:38:06 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 15:38:06 +0200 Subject: It's, like, still spreading Message-ID: Like It or Not, 'Like' Is Probably Here to Stay If Al Gore had followed his mistaken belief that a politician should be a man of the people, he would have addressed Los Angeles in its own language. "Together," he might have said, "we're going to, like, take this ticket, like, all the way across America to, like, the White House this November." The rest of this article from today's LA Times can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/living/20000820/t000078434.html Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 21 02:47:22 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 10:47:22 +0800 Subject: SO not cool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:39 PM -0700 8/20/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Larry, > > In your fieldwork in TVland, have you encountered any examples of > > SO VERY (not) cool/1950s/fired ? > >Rudy No, I never have. Actually, "so very cool" might have occurred without my processing it as an instance of what we're calling Gen-X 'so'. I could imagine, for example, "I'm feeling so very tired". But the others, where only the new 'so' could be involved, I'd definitely have noticed. larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 21 16:56:18 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 12:56:18 EDT Subject: Stockholm snippets Message-ID: Greetings from Stockholm, Sweden. We stopped at a highway rest stop before town, and there were two pregnancy magazines on the rack (and advertised outside the shop). Both showed the famous VANITY FAIR "Demi Moore" pregnancy pose. However, for one cover, the woman was very visibly naked. People seem to wear clothes in Stockholm, thankfully. EURO CREEP--Not "Euro trash," although they certainly CAN be creeps. FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 15, col. 2: "The news is another example of 'euro creep,' the slow adoption of the euro as a parallel currency in Britain..." NAME AND SHAME--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 200, pg. 2, col. 4: "...the OECD's 'name and shame' list of 35 offshore tax havens published in June." POLITICAL HYGEINE--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 1, col. 4: "Such a move would represent 'political hygeine,' he said." (Germany's Gerhard Schroeder on banning neo-Nazi groups.) RANDLORD--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 13, col. 1, obituary for South Africa's Harry Oppenheimer. EUPHENOMICS--THE ECONOMIST, August 19th, pg. 72, uses "euphenomics" (economics+ euphemism) for a happy spin on the dismal science. FALUN SAUSAGE--THE BERGSLAG DIAGONAL-580 KM OF EXPERIENCES IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GUSTAV VASA (1993), pg. 69: "The Falun sausage is a well-known local specialty." TUNNBRODS--Tunnel bread? A hot dog in a wrap sandwich, available here in Stockholm. The subway--50 years old--is "T" for tunnel. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 21 17:05:02 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 18:05:02 +0100 Subject: Stockholm snippets Message-ID: Barry said: > NAME AND SHAME--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 200, pg. 2, col. 4: "...the OECD's 'name and > shame' list of 35 offshore tax havens published in June." This article is following on the heels of a much more publicized "name and shame" campaign--against alleged pedophiles, organized by The News of the World (tabloid) and resulting in a fair amount of violence in the housing estates of nearby Portsmouth. At the moment "name and shame" is pretty much synonymous with the anti-pedophile campaign. Lynne From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Tue Aug 22 13:17:30 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 09:17:30 -0400 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck with a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as "get out of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, or is there another name for it? Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jester at PANIX.COM Tue Aug 22 14:32:32 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 10:32:32 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: from "Laurence Horn" at Aug 20, 2000 10:27:35 AM Message-ID: > Along with its modifying of non-modifiables (as in not only "You are > SO hired" but "You are SO fired", which I'm sure I've heard on > Friends at least once), there's also the striking (at least to me) > ability of the gen-X SO to take negated adjectives within its scope: > That is SO not cool. Needless to say, normal intensifying adverbs > (e.g. VERY) can't do this, but as far as I know neither does > intensifying WAY (way cool/#way not cool). e.g., 2000 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 30 Apr. (Seven Days section) 3/7 The book is so not dead. It's, like, totally awesome. 1997 New York Mag. 25 Aug. 152/3 Napoleons are so not fun to eat. > On another point, at the very end of the wonderful Times profile > (just to the right of the facial encounter from--what movis IS it > from, can anyone say?), Jesse describes--(or is quoted as > describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational > lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and > probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical > items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the > early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own > recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational > lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. I think this is best attributed to my "without a second's hesitation". It is certainly more widespread than computational lexicography. JTS From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 22 15:35:36 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:35:36 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: How about "indubitable," especially for the sound of it that makes sense? I was told by the late Prof. Donald B. Sands (circa 1963, in an Old English course!) that's what the pigeons are saying. If linguistic change applies here, I wonder what the pigeons are saying 37 years later. T.M.P. THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's(tm) Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca ======================= Fred Shapiro wrote: > >> Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the > sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). > > Fred Shapiro > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Fred R. Shapiro Editor > Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS > and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, > Yale Law School forthcoming > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu **** ANY PRICE ON THIS? **** (tmp) From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 16:41:51 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 17:41:51 +0100 Subject: vanishing languages/salon Message-ID: For those of you who were interested in the review of _Vanishing Languages_ on salon.com, the letters have now been posted. http://salon.com/letters/daily/2000/08/22/nettles_romaine/index.html They only chose 2 letters on the topic, one from Alaska Native Lgs Ctr, and one from a guy who believes that preserving languages is a way to stir up ethnic tensions. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 22 04:55:51 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 12:55:51 +0800 Subject: Semantic Shift? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000822091059.0092ec20@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: At 9:17 AM -0400 8/22/00, Kathleen Miller wrote: >Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck >with a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as >"get out of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, >or is there another name for it? > > >Kathleen E. Miller >Research Assistant to William Safire >The New York Times > >"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with >the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible >to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery When a word or phrase changes meaning while retaining its form, this would generally be described as an instance of semantic change. Some scholars would use "shift" in a narrower way to denote one variety of semantic change. Thus, for example, the change of GIRL to mean 'young female human' instead of the earlier 'young human' is an instance of semantic narrowing, the change of BIRD to mean 'avian creature' instead of the earlier 'young avian creature, young bird' is an instance of semantic broadening, and the change of BEAD to mean 'small round object' instead of the original 'prayer' (through a reanalysis of the phrase 'counting (one's) beads', when wooden balls on a string were used to keep track of one's prayers) is an instance of semantic shift or transfer. All three of these developments fit within the general category of semantic change. (Some would call all of these changes "shifts", but I find the distinction useful to retain.) In any case, I would expect that the sort of change you're looking at in the history of "get out of here" would indeed count as an instance of semantic shift, like that in the history of BEAD. Larry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 18:07:48 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:07:48 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. Not anymore. One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 19:23:21 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 20:23:21 +0100 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. > > Not anymore. > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > Peter Mc. I don't see why this doesn't involve the "literal" meaning. She wants a "go ahead" to not bother stuffing the envelopes. I suppose your point is that she's asking permission to not take a course of action, so she can't go ahead to it. (Is that what you're saying?) She certainly does need a go-ahead to not do it, though, if it was previously considered part of her job to stuff them. The other (non-negative) cases seem to be saying "I assume I have your permission to..." (and sometimes they also seem to mean "I give myself permission to", as in "I'm going to go ahead and buy those endangered species shoes.") The thing about 'go ahead' and permission seems to be that it involves permission for somthing that you were inclined/expected to do anyway, but for which there was some barrier to your just doing it. For example, the sec'y who says "I'll go ahead and get him" is acknowledging that it's what she'd like to do (because it's what you want her to do) but she still has to excuse herself from your presence. So the "I'll go ahead and.." is "assuming I have your permission, I'll..." I think you'd hear this a lot in secretaries because everything they do involves someone else's permission. (And I think you'd hear it a lot from women because they're overrepresented in such positions.) I've checked the web for some other go-ahead-and-not examples. Most were literal "go forward" sorts of things. (E.g., "We'll just go ahead (in the proceedings) and not discuss this matter further.") Here are a couple of examples that seemed to be more like your secretary's example. http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19990724/ile24087.html I would go ahead and not charge toll on cargo vehicles, which are already burdened by various taxes,... http://rainforest.parentsplace.com/dialog/get/f10infertility/42.html Ok, now that the vertice is in, I can go ahead and not give up for a few months. Public Health people said it was ok not to get the shots I would need to do home daycare. I can just get them later... (the vertice?) I'll just go ahead and sign myself Lynne From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 19:39:10 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:39:10 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. DMLance "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. > > Not anymore. > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > Peter Mc. > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From prez234 at JUNO.COM Wed Aug 23 09:26:45 2000 From: prez234 at JUNO.COM (Joseph McCollum) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 04:26:45 CDT Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:10:21 EDT Bapopik at aol.com writes: >It could just as easily be Spam Cam. >--Barry Popik Oh, I like that one much better. This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" I have heard two different versions: (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, but what are s & p ? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 22 20:25:14 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:25:14 EDT Subject: Grand Hotel (Stockholm) cocktails Message-ID: Greetings from Stockholm--where I am NOT staying at the Grand Hotel. L. O. Smith supposedly stayed at the place. He founded Absolut. From the Grand Hotel menu: COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH FRENCH APPLE--Calcados, Dry Sherry, Champagne, Cranberry. OSCAR II--Punsch, Champagne. GIN BY ME--Gin, Absolut Currant, Lime Juice. ABSOLUT AMOUR--Absolut Citron, Parfait Amour, Cranberry, Citron, Sprite. GOTLANDSH SOMMARNATT--Gin, Cointreau, Banana Liqueur, Orange Juice. HASHI DASHI--Vodka, Compari, Bitter Lemon. COFFEE D.O.M.--Benedictine, Coffee, WHipped Cream. ITALIAN--Strega, Coffee, WHipped Cream. IRISH MEXICAN LEONARD SACHS--Grand Marnier, Kahlua, Coffee, Whipped Cream. (Attached is some cocktail stuff that was in my e-mail ...I also have another great ABUZZ question to answer today.) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: editor at cocktail.com Subject: [cocktail.com] The Cocktail.Communiqué/August 22, 2000 Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:40:07 -0000 Size: 5571 URL: From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 20:30:24 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:30:24 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it seems strange to others. DMLance "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. > DMLance > > "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > > > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > > > > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > > carry out. > > > > Not anymore. > > > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > > > Peter Mc. > > > > **************************************************************************** > > Peter A. McGraw > > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 20:36:48 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:36:48 +0100 Subject: vanishing languages/salon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >For those of you who were interested in the review of _Vanishing >Languages_ on salon.com, the letters have now been posted. > David Crystal will be giving a talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on vanishing languages and their preservation this Sunday. Does anybody want me to record it for them? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:03:17 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:03:17 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <39A2E2DA.A4F2EEE6@missouri.edu> Message-ID: --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 3:30 PM -0500 "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating > with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible > move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or > after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it > seems strange to others. > DMLance > In my case, too, the expression fits perfectly in that context, and "I'd say that" in the same situation. The "secretarial" usage I was trying to describe, however, is in situations where there is NO overt context of permission, hesitation-then-resolve, etc. Rather, it's become a meaningless preface to almost every verb. Lynne may be on the right track in suggesting that it arose among secretaries because they're used to needing permission to do everything. If so, though, it's become so ingrained that it's used by some even in contexts where permission--or resolve-after-hesitation or whatever--is not involved, at least overtly. Even though I'd also use "go ahead and" in the same contexts Donald would, I'm sure I'd never "go ahead and" NOT do something in any context except, perhaps, a creatively facetious one. Peter Mc. > "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > >> Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. >> DMLance >> >> "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: >> >> > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. >> > >> > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around >> > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, >> > "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's >> > confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the >> > like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes >> > "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get >> > ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that >> > at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that >> > the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, >> > have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. >> > >> > Not anymore. >> > >> > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and >> > not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to >> > complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. >> > >> > Peter Mc. >> > >> > ********************************************************************** >> > ****** Peter A. McGraw >> > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR >> > pmcgraw at linfield.edu **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:11:14 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:11:14 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. I've never thought of go-ahead-and-V as being related to being given a go-ahead, as in permission. To me (and I do use the expression) it indicates my decision to do something that I had perhaps been thinking about not doing or something that I was putting off. E.g., I think I'll go ahead and vacuum the dog hairs off of the car seat (I had been thinking about doing it tomorrow but have decided to go ahead and do it now) or I think I'll go ahead and tell him that I don't want to go (I had been thinking about not telling him). I sometimes use go-on-and-V in the same contexts. I'm not sure which I use more often, go-on-and or go-ahead-and. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:27:59 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:27:59 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: The "go ahead" portion might not be acquiescence of a subordinate but an indication that the new request interrupts something else (s)he's been doing during a busy day. It may be directed to herself (her, since the tone of the discussion seems to have been gendered in this direction) rather than to the boss. DMLance "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 3:30 PM -0500 "Donald M. Lance" > wrote: > > > P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating > > with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible > > move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or > > after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it > > seems strange to others. > > DMLance > > > > In my case, too, the expression fits perfectly in that context, and "I'd > say that" in the same situation. > > The "secretarial" usage I was trying to describe, however, is in situations > where there is NO overt context of permission, hesitation-then-resolve, > etc. Rather, it's become a meaningless preface to almost every verb. > > Lynne may be on the right track in suggesting that it arose among > secretaries because they're used to needing permission to do everything. > If so, though, it's become so ingrained that it's used by some even in > contexts where permission--or resolve-after-hesitation or whatever--is not > involved, at least overtly. > > Even though I'd also use "go ahead and" in the same contexts Donald would, > I'm sure I'd never "go ahead and" NOT do something in any context except, > perhaps, a creatively facetious one. > > Peter Mc. > > > "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > > > >> Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. > >> DMLance > >> > >> "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > >> > >> > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > >> > > >> > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > >> > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, > >> > "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's > >> > confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the > >> > like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes > >> > "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get > >> > ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that > >> > at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that > >> > the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, > >> > have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. > >> > > >> > Not anymore. > >> > > >> > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and > >> > not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to > >> > complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. > >> > > >> > Peter Mc. > >> > > >> > ********************************************************************** > >> > ****** Peter A. McGraw > >> > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > >> > pmcgraw at linfield.edu > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:34:38 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 17:34:38 -0400 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <200008222111.QAA09960@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's self-permission. "Go on and (do something)" is less common for me but not unfamiliar. Neither form has ever struck me as "secretarial" in tone or use, and neither form appears to be regionally restricted, from the cites of us three (Texas?, Mississippi, and Minnesota). At 04:11 PM 8/22/00 -0500, you wrote: >Peter McGraw wrote: > > > Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > > carry out. > >I've never thought of go-ahead-and-V as being related to being given >a go-ahead, as in permission. To me (and I do use the expression) >it indicates my decision to do something that I had perhaps been >thinking about not doing or something that I was putting off. E.g., >I think I'll go ahead and vacuum the dog hairs off of the car seat >(I had been thinking about doing it tomorrow but have decided to go >ahead and do it now) or I think I'll go ahead and tell him that I >don't want to go (I had been thinking about not telling him). > >I sometimes use go-on-and-V in the same contexts. I'm not sure which >I use more often, go-on-and or go-ahead-and. > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 22:22:48 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:22:48 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000822172747.016bddd0@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Since (with all due respect) nobody so far seems to understand what I'm talking about (not permission, not self-permission, not proceeding-after-a-pause-or-hesitation, not equivalent to "go on and" -- just an empty formula devoid of meaning, more like a nervous tick than anything else), I wonder if the phenomenon I've observed IS in fact regional. I never thought of it as such, but I wouldn't swear I'd heard it elsewhere. I'd ALMOST swear I heard it used by our dept. secretary in Tennessee, but that was a long time ago. Peter Mc. --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 5:34 PM -0400 Beverly Flanigan wrote: > I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never > thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's > self-permission. "Go on and (do something)" is less common for me but not > unfamiliar. Neither form has ever struck me as "secretarial" in tone or > use, and neither form appears to be regionally restricted, from the cites > of us three (Texas?, Mississippi, and Minnesota). **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From gcohen at UMR.EDU Tue Aug 22 22:53:24 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:53:24 -0600 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Kathleen Miller (Aug. 22, 2000) wrote: > >Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck with >a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as "get out >of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, or is there >another name for it? > ------I would refer interested linguists to my article 'Change of Meaning in Context', _Forum Linguisticum_, vol. 2, no. 3, April 1978, pp.257-266. Based on this article I would say about Noo Yawkese "get out of here": We deal with an expression acquiring a secondary meaning in context. The literal meaning remains: "Get out of here (with your ridiculous ideas)." But a secondary meaning also appears: "That's absolutely ridiculous." One may view the situation as if there is a pregnant woman, with conception having occurred (the foetus is the new meaning of "Get out of here") but with birth not yet having occurred (the new meaning--"That's absolutely ridiculous"-- is not yet independent of the basic meaning--"Leave!" FWI, I have given new terminology to this sort of development: 1) "genosemy" (stress on -o-) literally: conception of meaning -- the acquring by a word (or morpheme or group of words) of a secondary meaning in a given context. 2) "toxemy", literally: birth of meaning. -- the development of a secondary meaning into a primary one. (e.g. "as well"--primary meaning: "as capably", e.g. "He plays the violin like a master and can play the piano as well;" secondary meaning in context here: "also." Then, e.g.: "He flunked physics and failed chemistry as well." All connections with "as capably" are lost for "as well" in this last example. 3) "physemy" literally: the growth of meaning -- genosemy and toxemy combined. This pertains to the "as well" example just above. In the above example "Get out of here," we see genosemy but not toxemy. The woman, so to speak, is still pregnant. -----Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Tue Aug 22 23:22:30 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 18:22:30 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > not equivalent to "go on and" -- How does it differ from "go on and"? Could you give some more examples? --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Wed Aug 23 01:23:57 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 20:23:57 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: I think Peter has given enough examples. It seems to me he's claiming that some people, perhaps more in some region(s), use the the expression with NO hint of implicit or explicit will and no triggering context. Peter, do you mean something like someone saying "OK, I read in the paper this morning that xyz" when there's absolutely no way anyone could conjure up elements in the situation that would call for assent, dissent, or other "sentness" etc.? OK, maybe so. DMLance Natalie Maynor wrote: > Peter McGraw wrote: > > > not equivalent to "go on and" -- > > How does it differ from "go on and"? Could you give some more examples? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From P2052 at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 02:23:39 2000 From: P2052 at AOL.COM (P2052 at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 22:23:39 EDT Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: For me, too, patterns, "go ahead and" and "go on and," have different meanings. For example, I have heard "go ahead and" used both to reaffirm a decision to perform an action and to urge the immediate initiation of that action, which all participants understand to be a necessary one. However, I have heard "go on and" used to urge the continuance of an action that has already begun (either physically [the person has actually made a move toward the completion of that act], psychologically [the person appears to have altered his or her immediate environment in preparation for the act], or verbally [the person has indicated plans to immediately engage in the act]. I can say "Go ahead [with your decision [plan] to perform this action]", but not "Go on [with your decision [plan] to perform this action]." In my mind, "go ahead and" marks the decision as important a part of the process as the performance of the action. With "go on and," the focus is not on the decision; rather, the focus is on the actuall performance of the act itself, whose starting point, or preliminary step, is inconsequential. PAT From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Wed Aug 23 07:21:23 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 02:21:23 -0500 Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: Joseph McCollum wrote: > This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" > > I have heard two different versions: > > (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story > unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller > of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) > > (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, > but what are s & p ? Yes, there should be something in the ADS Archives -- but I'm too rushed this week to look it up myself. My wild guess is that this application of spam comes out of Monty Python's Flying Circus: the Spam skit. The original airing of that show was early enough that it probably antedates the first appearances of that stuff we call spam on the Internet. There always has been a wide overlap between dedicated Monty Python fans and Internet residents, so my guess is plausible even if it's dead wrong. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! P.S.: I used "residents" deliberately. That was supposed to be the term of choice in formal speech about programs for the inmates/prisoners/convicts/perps/ cons/what-have-you at Stateville, the ancient maximum security prison run by the state of Illinois. Ooops -- I didn't mean "prison", of course. I should have said "correctional facility". I taught in the program Northern Illinois University used to run for Stateville residents. Some of our students were such longterm residents that they completed high school equivalency courses and went on to earn NIU bachelor's degrees on the inside. (In fact, one of my former students inside Stateville entered graduate study at NIU when he got out. He turned out to be one of the most effective teaching assistants in the English department, on his way to the Ph.D.) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 23 03:32:05 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 23:32:05 -0400 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: "Aaron E. Drews" writes: >>>>> As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is losing its consistency in practice, I think. <<<<< Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political joke. "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it well-formed? In what contexts *does* this treatment apply? -- Mark, (though nothing like the traveler Barry is) from Ieper (Where I heard Last Call at the Menenpoort on Sunday night and said Kaddish for all the dead commemorated there.) From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 09:23:47 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:23:47 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > > "Aaron E. Drews" writes: > > >>>>> > As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the > plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal > system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, > government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is > losing its consistency in practice, I think. > <<<<< > > Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) > > "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political > joke. I think it would be "are", although I can't recall having heard the plural in this way. > > "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? Definitely. I just heard this morning on chldren's television in a pseudo-reinactment of Euro 2000, the presenter said "and Romania are through to the finals". > > "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it > well-formed? Yes, it is well-formed. I'm not sure when a singular would be used, if at all. I'll keep my ear out since Europe, the European Commission, France, Germany, etc. are often in the 'local' news. I'll see if I can find some printed quotes, too, although I never read the sports section. I think "Brussels" takes the singular, although I'm not sure at all. --Aaron ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 23 14:59:53 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:59:53 -0400 Subject: spam (was: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?)) Message-ID: Joseph McCollum writes: >>>>> This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" I have heard two different versions: (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, but what are s & p ? <<<<< The usual suspect is Monty Python's Flying Circus. A fellow in a restaurant asks what's available. Most or all of the items on the list that the waitress recites include Spam, usually ridiculously (of course), and the conversation keeps getting interrupted by the other patrons (a party of Vikings) singing in chorus: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam. It's repetitive, voluminous, unasked-for, unwanted, and content-free, and it drowns out everything else. Don't ask me where I picked this up; probably prior discussion here, and probably elsewhere as well. -- Mark From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Wed Aug 23 12:02:07 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 14:02:07 +0200 Subject: Pamplemousse Message-ID: Just a quick heads-up to say I'm back on the list. My received mail count dipped under 120 per day and I was feeling a little left out... -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 30 rue de Beaubourg 75003 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 12:50:11 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 13:50:11 +0100 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: > From: Beverly Flanigan > I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never > thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's > self-permission. If linguistic analysis comes down to what we're thinking that we're doing when we say something, then we might as well all go home! I'm sure most people who pepper their sentences with "you know" or "like" don't think they're doing much there either. Perhaps the word "permission" was troublesome to some of you, but I do think "go ahead and" a face-management tactic (in the politeness theory sense of "face"). But I think analyzing it is also a bit tricky because I think there's more than one use for "go ahead and". For the most part, it seems to involve stating the intention to do something that's already been introduced into the realm of possibilities. This would be a fun thing to do a corpus study of. I'm also wondering if there's a particular prosodic signature for the ones that Peter thinks are particularly empty. The problem with this list is that I keep adding more things to my "to be researched" list instead of finishing my "to be researching" list. Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 13:07:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 14:07:15 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: > "Aaron E. Drews" writes: > > >>>>> > As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the > plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal > system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, > government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is > losing its consistency in practice, I think. > <<<<< > > Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) > > "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political > joke. > > "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? > > "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it > well-formed? > > In what contexts *does* this treatment apply? If France is standing for a group of people, then it's likely to be treated as a plural in BrE--just as any singular collective noun referring to people is likely to be treated as a plural (e.g., "the jury have retired to the conference room"). So, you could have France are when it refers to a team, as you've given above. France are suffering from the injury of their top player. However, you're much more likely to hear "The French are..." in a lot of these contexts, so it's not easy to find examples. (Tried to check on Altavista.uk, but ran into too many e.g.s like "the majority of ATMs in France are made in Scotland"--fun fact of the day). BTW, Fowler's (3rd ed.) says that United States and the Vatican are _always_ treated as singulars. Lynne From bookrat at BOOKRAT.COM Wed Aug 23 14:51:20 2000 From: bookrat at BOOKRAT.COM (Bookrat) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 07:51:20 -0700 Subject: Dot-com lot Message-ID: >From an article in today's Salon ("Dot-com culture clash"): '"You're starting to hear, 'Oh, that's a dot-com lot' where you see an expensive house torn down to make room for a bigger one," says a local politician.' (http://www.salon.com/business/feature/2000/08/23/sbarbara/index1.html) Living as I do in Silicon Valley, I am surprised not to have heard that term here. Ken Miller Assistant Drone Johnson Institute for the Study of Harmless Drudgery From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 16:25:03 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 12:25:03 EDT Subject: More from Stockholm Message-ID: Greetings again from Stockholm. Unfortunately, the Grant Barrett ancestral home is not on my tour. I've got to go to dinner and don't have time for my Swedish food roundup. -------------------------------------------------------- BIG APPLE ON ABUZZ (continued, of course) I wait awhile for people to post. Of the last few postings on the Big Apple, the Salwen "whore theory" was mentioned. You put any crap up on the internet, and people quote it. Gerald Cohen writes an entire book--NEVER QUOTED! The NY Times should have addressed this five years ago and Salwen should have been shamed enough to remove it. Again, the Big Apple is not mentioned in CITY OF EROS (a history of NYC prostitution), the POLICE GAZETTE's slang lists (it's not ANYWHERE in the Police Gazette), Stephen Crane's MAGGIE--GIRL OF THE STREETS... Someone on Abuzz mentioned the Big A--the nickname of Aqueduct racetrack. This was coined by NY Daily News writer Gene Ward in the 1950s, after Big Apple=NYC racetracks. Gene Ward is another person who was alive eight years ago, but who's now dead. I'm told that William Safire might actually address the "Big Apple" in September. If so, again, I have tons of important stuff that's never been published and that he's never looked at. I sent it to him eight years ago, and it's pretty embarrassing to send it to him and tell him everything now. -------------------------------------------------------- FINANCIAL TIMES I told the FINANCIAL TIMES that Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady and Eddie Jones will not all play for the Miami Heat--the first two players signed with the Orlando Magic. Miami and Orlando are not the same! The paper will, perhaps, correct its error. I also suggested a "business jargon" column. The FINANCIAL TIMES--which has a sports column, a chess column, a crossword puzzle, a bridge column, a gardening column, et al.--said that a language column just wasn't for them. See attached. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Sheila.Bradbury at ft.com (Sheila Bradbury) Subject: Baseball column Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:40:57 +0100 Size: 2353 URL: From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 23 17:36:55 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:36:55 -0700 Subject: Grand Hotel (Stockholm) cocktails Message-ID: --- Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Stockholm--where I am NOT staying > at the Grand Hotel. > L. O. Smith supposedly stayed at the place. He > founded Absolut. > From the Grand Hotel menu: > > COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH > FRENCH APPLE--Calcados, Dry Sherry, Champagne, > Cranberry. Calcados = Calvados - apple brandy? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 20:49:00 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 16:49:00 EDT Subject: Back from Old Stockholm Message-ID: I'm back from dinner in Old Stockholm. I have three minutes before this place closes at 10:30 p.m. "Calvados" was misspelled. This internet place has me typing in the dark and I hit the wrong key on this foreign keyboard. BANKOMAT--The tour guide read that a Swedish person invented the ATM. The ATMs were Minibanks in Norway, but they are Bankomats here. There is an R for registered trademark. FRENCH HOT DOG--These are sold all over. In Norway, I reported on the "French Dog Dressing." BREVANN--a drink selection in Trondheim. Vodka, banana liqueur, curacoa, sour mix, grape soda (shaken). GUL GENSER--Another Trondheim drink. Vodka, banana liqueur, orange juice. TRUSEFJERNER--Another Trondheim drink. Vodka, banana liqueur, lime, Sprite. KAFFE MELANGE--Found in Trondheim, Norway. "Enkel espresso, O'boy (chocolate syrup--ed), mjelk." IRISH COFFEE, KAFFE BENEDICTINE, KAFFE PARISIENNE, KAFFE MANDARINE-Coffee selections at the Amiralen in Stockholm, located near the national museums. KIRSBERRY KISS--A drink at the Amiralen. Contains Kirsberry, tonic, citron. DRINK AND DRIVE, DRINK AND GO--Non-alcoholic selections at the Amiralen. Contents weren't indicated. DRINK A L'AMIRALEN--Champagne, cognac, apricot. TOAST SKAGEN, SOLE WALEWSKI, FILET OF VEAL OSCAR, CLOUDBERRY PARFAIT--Some food selections at the Amiralen. -------------------------------------------------------- SWEDISH COOKING ICA Bokforlag (www.forlaget.ica.se/bok) First edition published 1971, 14th edition 1995, fourth printing 2000 112 pages A nice "Swedish Culinary Glossary from A to O" is on pages 105-108. Pg. 42: Sailor's Beef. Pg. 52: Sun's Eye. Pg. 60: Jansson's Temptation. Pg. 86: Rice a la Malta. Pg. 88: Hono Bread. Pg. 90: Brogards Bread. Pg. 90: Skane Loaf. Pg. 96: Danish Pastry. (Swedish name given is "Wienerbroad" or Vienna bread-ed.) Pg. 100--Princess Torte. Pg. 104--Roslagen's Coffee. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 09:32:21 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:32:21 EDT Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: From today's FINANCIAL TIMES, 24 August 2000, pg. 8, col. 6: The new economy has another piece of jargon. "Neutramediaries" are independent third parties that provide services to business-to-business electronic marketplaces. The FT "E-Business" column, pg. 12, col. 1, has "Intel backs 'bypass' technology." What is that? Well, look in the FT or WSJ business dictionary! (There is none.) In today's Letters, pg. 10, col. 5, "Webster's dictionary" is cited. Which Webster's? The e-mail address is letter.editor at ft.com. Page 9 has such classic business columns as "Cinema," "Music," and "Arts." A few years ago, I mentioned the book HOW WRITING BEGAN. It began with written numbers. Then there were written letters. It all began with trade--business. Business helped to create language itself! It's pathetic that there can be such columns in computer magazines (WIRED) and music magazines (REVOLUTION), but the FT and the WSJ still act as if all these e- and i- terms need no explanation whatsoever. My idea was a daily column written by several regulars, such as me, Jesse, Lynne, Dennis, whomever. Maybe someone else can approach the FT? Maybe someone from "Webster's"? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 09:37:11 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:37:11 EDT Subject: Frapino Message-ID: "Frapino" is the registered trademark of the Coffee Cup. Starbucks, of course, has "Frapuccino." These are probably somewhere on the web. Robert's Coffee has: COCCACINO--espresso med chokladkram och varm mjolk. ORIENTALISK LATTE--dubbel espresso, varm mjolk, kanel och kardemumma. HUNTER--dubbel espresso med varm mjolk romsandk toppad med choklad. HASSELDROM--dubbel espresso varm mjolk hasselnot och kamelsmak toppad med gradde. ABSOLUT--There's an interesting story on Sweden's ABSOLUT in today's FINANCIAL TIMES, pg. 34. From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 09:50:02 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:50:02 -0400 Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: I really like Barry's idea of a business terms column, featuring lots of new e- and i- lingo. I am going to contact the WSJ about this, and will let everyone know what they say. Who at ADS would control the use of the name of the Society as a sanctioner of the column? Would it be possible for ADS to make a buck on this, with part of each column fee going to the author of that column? Under that scenario, I think re-use rights would be the property of ADS. Allan? Frank Abate From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 12:18:54 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:18:54 +0100 Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: > It's pathetic that there can be such columns in computer magazines (WIRED) and music > magazines (REVOLUTION), but the FT and the WSJ still act as if all these e- and i- terms > need no explanation whatsoever. > My idea was a daily column written by several regulars, such as me, Jesse, Lynne, > Dennis, whomever. > Maybe someone else can approach the FT? Maybe someone from "Webster's"? > I think if you want to get a British business publication to cover language regularly, you have a much better bet with the Economist, which tends to see the connections between life and money better than financial newspapers do. One reason FT probably doesn't care about language is that it's _Guardian_ and _Independent_ turf. It really is a joy to see how much writing is done about language in the newspapers here (if you read the right papers). Reflections on words, dictionaries, etymologies. If the FT did do a column, I doubt they'd want so many Yanks writing on it! All they know about language is killing it! (This is not a point to be debated, just the expression of a stereotype.) Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From gcohen at UMR.EDU Thu Aug 24 14:15:53 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 08:15:53 -0600 Subject: B. Popik's new material on "The Big Apple" Message-ID: In an Aug. 23 message Barry Popik wrote in part: > I'm told that William Safire might actually address the "Big Apple" in >September. If so, again, I have tons of important stuff that's never been >published.... > -----------If Barry would send me that material, I'll publish it, first in _Comments on Etymology_ (a series of working papers) and then formally in my monograph series _Studies in Slang_. ---Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 14:03:44 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:03:44 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language Message-ID: Lynne M said from the UK: >> It really is a joy to see how much writing is done about language in the newspapers here (if you read the right papers). Reflections on words, dictionaries, etymologies. << This picks up on a tendency that's well known to US publishers. It is VERY hard to get any US paper, or even the widely read reviewing publications, to agree to publish a review for a reference book, esp. a general dictionary. Even the NYT Book Review will not, except perhaps for a major new edition of one of the established dicts. In the UK, the TLS regularly reviews ref books and general dicts, as do the similar reviewing pubs from other papers. I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. It is a disservice to the US book-buying community. You have to really look hard to find accurate and reliable info on which dictionary to choose, and how they differ. Ken Kister did a great job with this for many years, but his work is not widely known outside the library and ref editorial world (a pretty small world, to be sure). Frank Abate From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 14:08:31 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:08:31 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language In-Reply-To: <000a01c00dd4$1dc5bd20$e301a8c0@fabate> from "Frank Abate" at Aug 24, 2000 10:03:44 AM Message-ID: > > I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, > the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref > books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be > done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by > librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. Actually, Publishers Weekly just ran a review of the AHD4. It looks like it's a rephrasing of the press release, but that is also par for the course for U.S. dictionary reviews. Still, it's there. Jesse Sheidlower OED From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 14:36:32 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:36:32 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language Message-ID: Jesse S said: >> Actually, Publishers Weekly just ran a review of the AHD4. It looks like it's a rephrasing of the press release, but that is also par for the course for U.S. dictionary reviews. Still, it's there. << Thanks for the word, Jesse. That's a very good thing, and a new attitude on the part of PW. But I'll bet AHD had to fight hard to get them to do it. Frank Abate From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 15:14:21 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:14:21 +0100 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: For reasons too boring to go into (re a manuscript on antonymy), I need to find a dictionary that lists the word 'unedible' (could be in the entry for 'edible', could be in the long list of un- words some dictionaries have, could be its own entry). I have reason to believe that there is a US dictionary that includes it, since the National Scrabble Association's _Official Tournament and Club Word List_ (published by Merriam-Webster) includes it. According to an article about the word list that I read in _Scrabble News_ (ok, it's official, I'm the biggest nerd on the planet), the words in it are derived from a number of US dictionaries (but the preface to OTCWL just mentions M-W's 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you check for me? Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay Championships this weekend. Your nerd, Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From stevek at SHORE.NET Thu Aug 24 15:19:50 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:19:50 -0400 Subject: unedible request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th > Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or > Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you > check for me? It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) > Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay > Championships this weekend. Good luck! New to AHD4 are 'jo' and 'suq'. The Scrabble players on the staff were quick to notice they weren't in A3. :) From epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM Thu Aug 24 15:14:33 2000 From: epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM (Pearsons, Enid) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:14:33 -0400 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: _Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary_ has "unedible" as an adj. in among the un- words listed at the bottom of p. 2064, second column. Enid Pearsons Senior Editor Random House Reference -----Original Message----- From: Lynne Murphy [mailto:lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 11:14 AM To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: unedible request For reasons too boring to go into (re a manuscript on antonymy), I need to find a dictionary that lists the word 'unedible' (could be in the entry for 'edible', could be in the long list of un- words some dictionaries have, could be its own entry). I have reason to believe that there is a US dictionary that includes it, since the National Scrabble Association's _Official Tournament and Club Word List_ (published by Merriam-Webster) includes it. According to an article about the word list that I read in _Scrabble News_ (ok, it's official, I'm the biggest nerd on the planet), the words in it are derived from a number of US dictionaries (but the preface to OTCWL just mentions M-W's 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you check for me? Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay Championships this weekend. Your nerd, Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 15:25:46 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:25:46 +0100 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: > From: "Steve K." > It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p > 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) Thanks very much Steve! I now withdraw my unedible request. Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 15:22:38 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:22:38 -0400 Subject: unedible request In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 24, 2000 11:19:50 AM Message-ID: > > On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > > > 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th > > Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or > > Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you > > check for me? > > It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p > 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) It's also in WNW4, as a list word, and is of course in OED. Good luck! Jesse Sheidlower From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 16:24:41 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:24:41 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language In-Reply-To: <000a01c00dd4$1dc5bd20$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > This picks up on a tendency that's well known to US publishers. It is VERY > hard to get any US paper, or even the widely read reviewing publications, to > agree to publish a review for a reference book, esp. a general dictionary. > Even the NYT Book Review will not, except perhaps for a major new edition of > one of the established dicts. In the UK, the TLS regularly reviews ref > books and general dicts, as do the similar reviewing pubs from other papers. This observation fits with my own experience. When I published the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, it was reviewed in England by the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, and TLS (even though it was an explicitly Americancentric book!), but it was not generally reviewed by American newspapers. The New York Times wrote two entire feature stories about the book, but it was not deemed worthy of coverage by their book reviewers. > I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, > the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref > books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be > done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by > librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. I think this also was true of my book: reviewed in Library Journal, Choice and Booklist, but not by Publishers Weekly. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From language at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 24 16:37:39 2000 From: language at NYTIMES.COM (William Safire) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:37:39 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: (I have not yet subscribed to the listserver, but will as soon as I have an e-mail address -- please reply to this address in the meantime.) Reporting on the Democratic National Convention, a writer for the LA Times recently wrote: "Identifying the D.C. contingent was easy at Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's party in the Conga Room. If she was wearing a revealing top, a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stillettos, if she had that come-hither look, she was definitely Left Coast." The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the more specific manner in which it is used above? Thanks very much, Elizabeth Phillips Research Assistant to William Safire From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 16:55:37 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:55:37 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> from "William Safire" at Aug 24, 2000 12:37:39 PM Message-ID: > Reporting on the Democratic National Convention, a writer for the LA Times > recently wrote: "Identifying the D.C. contingent was easy at Senate > Minority Leader Tom Daschle's party in the Conga Room. If she was wearing a > revealing top, a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stillettos, if she had > that come-hither look, she was definitely Left Coast." > > The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is > synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the > more specific manner in which it is used above? I'm not sure I understand the more specific manner you have in mind. The quoted sentence seems to suggest that a woman with this provocative outlet and demeanor was clearly a Californian, not a D.C.'er. It's a little oddly phrased, since the writer seems to mean that identifying those _not_ from the D.C. contingent is easy, but it makes sense. Jesse Sheidlower OED From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:33:12 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:33:12 -0700 Subject: Go ahead and (last time, I promise) Message-ID: With apologies, since we've pretty much run this topic into the ground by now, I can't resist adding a new usage note. Last night I discovered another group that suffers from the vacuous-go-ahead virus: computer tech support people--who in my experience are mostly male. It's never "Now click on 'control panel'"--it's "Now goaheadn click on 'control panel.' OK, now goaheadn double click on 'properties,'" etc. An actual quote from last night: "O.k., try that, and if it doesn't work, call again and they'll goaheadn help you." Now I promise I'll goaheadn shut up. Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From einstein at FROGNET.NET Thu Aug 24 17:25:18 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:25:18 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: Among conservatives (probably deriving from Rush or some other radio commentator), the term for the eastern megalopolis from Boston > D.C. is called the left coast. Presumably the west, where all the good conservatives live, is right. -- db ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:41:34 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:41:34 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, William Safire wrote: > The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is > synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the > more specific manner in which it is used above? This doesn't address the specific meaning question, but I can give earlier evidence for "Left Coast" than the 1988 dating in the RHHDAS: 1980 _N.Y. Times_ 6 July (Nexis) If you're standing in Texas looking north, as Texans frequently do, the Left Coast is where Hollywood is. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:51:15 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:51:15 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: At 01:25 PM 8/24/2000 -0400, bergdahl at ohio.edu wrote: >Among conservatives (probably deriving from Rush or some other radio >commentator), the term for the eastern megalopolis from Boston > D.C. is >called the left coast. Presumably the west, where all the good >conservatives live, is right. > I suspect this is a bit off, but then again we all tend to be most familiar with only the smallish circle of what is closest to us. I'm sure I've heard radio and TV hosts occasionally use "left coast" for some years now, in application to the Pacific coast as a supposed locus of "flaky" New Age stuff, "liberal" politics (Berkeley, Hollywood, Seattle anarchy, etc.). The west coast is on the left side of a map. Yes, the northeast is pretty liberal too. I imagine nonleftists think of themselves as tending to populate what bicoastalists sometimes refer to as "flyover country" -- inner west, south, etc. New Yorkers sometimes tend to think, rather insularly, of NY and LA (OK, maybe Miami too) as the only places in the U.S. that "matter," which generates a certain sense of NY/LA rivalry. Hence, cliches about LA and the "left coast" as flaky and goofy are pretty widespread in NYC. I suspect that's what the author cited in the original posting was getting at: "left coast" = putatively flaky, goofy, out-there, both culturally and politically.... Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 18:32:22 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:32:22 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> Message-ID: Here's a still earlier usage of "Left Coast": 1977 _Rolling Stone_ 30 June 106 (heading of record review) Wet Willie Left coast live. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 18:55:20 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:55:20 EDT Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: Interesting question from Frank: << Who at ADS would control the use of the name of the Society as a sanctioner of the column? Would it be possible for ADS to make a buck on this, with part of each column fee going to the author of that column? Under that scenario, I think re-use rights would be the property of ADS. Allan? >> The answer is, the ADS Executive Council is the ultimate authority. This would be enough of a departure from current practice that it would require Council approval. Might be a good topic for Council discussion at the January meeting - unless a decision is needed sooner. - Allan From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 19:16:02 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:16:02 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: I've just looked through a very large number of citations for "left coast" courtesy of a big database. Every one I looked at used the term to refer to California. It is possible that there is a political sense in which "left coast" refers to Washington, D.C. However I find it hard to believe that the use is that widespread--perhaps it is, but the evidence isn't available to me. The possibilities as I see it are that (as I first suggested) the original quotation represents an awkwardly written attestation of the 'West Coast' sense; or that the quotation really does attest _Left Coast_ 'East Coast'. Presumably the matter could be cleared up with a phone call from Mr. Safire to the writer of the article in question. Jesse Sheidlower OED From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 19:28:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:28:09 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: At 03:16 PM 8/24/2000 -0400, you wrote: >The possibilities as I see it are that (as I first suggested) >the original quotation represents an awkwardly written attestation >of the 'West Coast' sense; or that the quotation really does >attest _Left Coast_ 'East Coast'. Presumably the matter could >be cleared up with a phone call from Mr. Safire to the writer >of the article in question. > >Jesse Sheidlower >OED > What I left implicit in my other posting on this thread, and may as well "go ahead and" make explicit here, is that there seem to be two possibilities in the cited passage: (1) The description of the over-the-top attire is being used to suggest that the DC person is (deliberately?) dressed in over-the-top Hollywood fashion. The convention was held in LA, after all, and one of the commonplaces of political disourse for the last few years has been the affinities that seem to exist between Hollywoodites and members of the Clinton administration. Perhaps the writer is implying that DC Dems (presumably members of the administration and/or DC political operatives) deliberately adopted Left Coast fashion modes at some LA festivities. (2) Less likely, but I suppose it's *possible* that the LA Times columnist doesn't understand the usage of a locution hatched in right-of-center discourse. How much currency does the term "Left Coast" have on the, er, left coast? (3) Or, he's a journalist who doesn't always write -- it's been known to happen.... Deadlines and all that.... Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 19:45:22 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:45:22 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: Sorry, I got interrupted at the end of the last message. The *third* possibility was: (3) Or, he's a journalist who doesn't always write that carefully. -- It's been known to happen.... Deadlines and all that.... [Or interruptions, he added sheepishly.] Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Thu Aug 24 21:02:07 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 17:02:07 -0400 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: You go, girl!! Bob in Michigan > Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay > Championships this weekend. > > Your nerd, > Lynne > > Dr M Lynne Murphy > From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Fri Aug 25 04:05:52 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 00:05:52 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. I withdraw my question, apologize to Fred, and wish the book all success. (TMP). Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS > > Yale University Press, > > forthcoming > > > > **** ANY PRICE ON THIS? **** (tmp) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 25 11:51:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 07:51:50 EDT Subject: Gotland greetings Message-ID: Greetings from Visby, on the island of Gotland. It's called "the town of roses and ruins." I love this town. The stone Viking (or, "Wiking" as some have said) markers with runic inscriptions are just what I love. Just add a "no one has been able to decipher this" and I'm hooked. OK Q8--Popular 7-11-type stores (found on highways) in Sweden use this name. F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." -------------------------------------------------------- SWEDEN: THE SECRET FILES WHAT THEY'D RATHER KEEP TO THEMSELVES by Colin Moon Today Press AB 26 pages, 1999(?) "Swedish English (Swenglish)" is on page 24. An example is: "Please take off your clothes and follow me to the whip room." (Translation: "May I take your coat and accompany you to the VIP room.") Pg. 4--Stockholm is inhabited by "zero eights," so called because of their telephone area codes. Pg. 7--It also makes and exports Absolut vodka, which is rather ironic as the Swedish word for teetotaller is "absolutist." Pg. 15--..."langom," meaning "just enough"... Pg. 21--Swedish small talk. Swedes call this "cold talk" or "dead chat" which more or less sums up their opinion of it. -------------------------------------------------------- XENOPHOBE'S GUIDE TO THE SWEDES by Peter Berlin Oval Books, London 64 pages First edition 1994, second edition 1999 Pg. 21--As the Swedish saying goes: "Like master. like dog." Pg. 30--The cakes are covered with green marzipan, or sliced almonds ("toe-nails"), while the pastries have gobs of vanilla and strwaberry jam in the middle ("grandmother's cough"). Pg. 58--The Swedish Model has become the Swedish Muddle. From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 13:06:04 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 09:06:04 -0400 Subject: Gotland greetings: F-word Message-ID: Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > > ... > > F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." > I think "en film av Lukas Moodysson som gjorde Fucking Åmål" means "a film by Lukas Moodysson, who did 'Fucking Åmål'". The famous film "Fucking Åmål" was released in the US under another name ("Show Me Love", I think). I think the English loan word may be used figuratively/intensively here; Åmål is the name of a town. See (for example): http://www.stud.ee.ethz.ch/~emschmid/fa/lukasinterview.html ... and check the last sentence in the interview! -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 25 15:13:49 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 11:13:49 EDT Subject: Mike Ellis's SLANGUAGE Message-ID: SLANGUAGE The international USA TODAY, 24 August 2000, pg. 11B, col. 6, gave a free ad for Mike Ellis's new book, SLANGUAGE: A COOL, FRESH, PHAT AND SHAGADELIC GUIDE TO ALL KINDS OF SLANG (Hyperion, $14). It's compiled from his www.slanguage.com stuff that you can get for free (I imagine--I haven't seen the book out yet). It's stuff like Mad Monk Jim Crotty--lots of words and phrases, but no sources whatsoever. You have no idea how many people use the stuff, how old the stuff is, etc. It's probably useful as a fun reference, but just a starter for serious research. -------------------------------------------------------- YUPPIE TEDDY BEAR XENOPHOBE'S GUIDE TO THE SWEDES, pg. 13: The ultimate status symbol is to reserve yet another line for the mobile telephone or "yuppie teddy bear," so nicknamed because of the way the owner clutches it close to his cheek. -------------------------------------------------------- TELEPHONE BOOK From SOS GUIDE: SWEDISH OBSTACLES SIMPLIFIED (1999 by Kursverksamhetens forlag) by Christine Hungar-MacLeod and Angie Sundqvist, pg. 19: WHITE PAGES--private numbers PINK PAGES--businesses, organizations, governmental departments GREEN PAGES--communal organizations BLUE PAGES--medical and dental services RED PAGES--city and street maps Beer is on pg. 11: Class 1 Lattol Weak beer 2.25% volume (max.) Class 2 Folkol "Peoples beer" 3.4% volume (max.) Class 3 Mellanol and starkol Medium and strong beer From 3.5% volume I don't know what OED will have for "mellanol," or "middle-class beer." From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 25 16:04:46 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 09:04:46 -0700 Subject: Gotland greetings Message-ID: --- Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Visby, on the island of Gotland. > It's called "the town of roses and ruins." I love > this town. The stone Viking (or, "Wiking" as some > have said) markers with runic inscriptions are just > what I love. Just add a "no one has been able to > decipher this" and I'm hooked. > > OK Q8--Popular 7-11-type stores (found on highways) > in Sweden use this name. "Q8" refers to Kuwait Petroleum International Limited. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 25 17:54:53 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 13:54:53 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? In-Reply-To: <39A5F0A0.D680136F@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, Thomas Paikeday wrote: > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. I withdraw my question, apologize > to Fred, and wish the book all success. (TMP). No price has yet been set. Thanks for your good wishes. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Fri Aug 25 18:21:21 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 13:21:21 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or to other words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]. I've regularly heard the conductor Julius Rudel pronounced [ru'dEl], on a variety of programs on NPR. And a number of years ago Ball State had a head football coach named Schudel. His wife is a shirt-tail cousin of my wife, the family's from NW Ohio, near Toledo, and there the name has always been pronounced ['Sud at l]. When he was an assistant coach at Michigan, before he came to Ball State, he found his name so commonly being pronounced [Su'dEl] by people in football, that he adopted the form and made it clear when he came here that that was the pronunciation he preferred. Names that have been around longer seem to have initial stress, like Joel, although Noel goes both ways, more often [no'El] when referring to Christmas, but the composer/lyricist is always ['no at l] Coward. Even Joel, when pronounced as a borrowing from Modern Hebrew, becomes [yo'El], as in the name of the former conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. Other proper nouns have initial stress, like Bethel, Daniel, and Hazel, although I have heard the occasional [daen'yEl] for the spelling Daniel. A number of verbs have final stress, but they're Romance borrowings so that's not surprising: compel, expel, repel. Nouns and adjectives tend to have initial stress: bagel, chancel, chisel, counsel, cruel, diesel, dowel, fuel, hazel, jewel, towel, vowel, but there are exceptions to both patterns, like cancel (never [kaen'sEl], hotel, motel, and pastel. Why is a subset of these words, particularly surnames, undergoing this stress shift? Is it a spelling pronunciation, that is, final in names is rare enough that it seems odd and so it gets stressed, counter to more usual English stress patterns? Why the football connection? Two or three years ago, there was an African-American college player on a southern school team with a four-syllable Scots or Irish name (I don't remember the full name or whether it was Mac or Mc) that ended in . Network TV announcers regularly pronounced his name with final stress, a good trick for an American English four-syllable noun. Is there a southern pattern coming into this through football? Herb Stahlke Ball State University From einstein at FROGNET.NET Fri Aug 25 18:42:58 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 14:42:58 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: This is just a guess, but could the final [El] come from avoidance of syllabic-L rather than [@l] or [?l] ? The "swallowing" of the vowel could be heard by non-southerners as uneducated and as such to be avoided. Even [Il] --which I find n atural in some of the words cited-- might be heard as "slurring" and so to be avoided. Again, just a guess. -- db, whose name is pronounced ['b3g d?l] by a colleague originally from NC ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Fri Aug 25 19:13:02 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 14:13:02 -0500 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. The anthropologist in me can't resist what Lewis Carroll would have called a contrariwise: My wife and I have spent enough time in Mexico that we're no longer put out of joint when we run across deeply-rooted cultural contrasts. We usually just shift gears and follow local custom. Interacting with reasonably well-to-do people in such places as Mexico City, we still get shocked by very open exchanges about prices. In those circles, the taboo seems to be NOT asking the price of something (whether offered for sale or not). Not asking "how much did that cost?" comes close to implying "You are insignificant, and nobody cares about the things you possess or what they mean to you." It took a very long time for us to accept questions expressed in terms we simply can't imagine happening in similar circles in the U.S. A typical example of a statement that would be taken as appropriately gracious would be something like: "Thank you very much for this beautiful gift. It's exactly what I wanted. How much did it cost you?" -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 20:16:11 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:16:11 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: Herb Stahlke wrote: > > A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words > ending orthographically in . > In medicine, there is a position (supine, head down) called the Trendelenberg position, named after a certain Dr. Trendelenberg (this is in any medical dictionary). In my experience this is virtually always pronounced like /trEn'dEl at nbRg/. According to anecdote, Dr. T. pronounced his name /'trEnd at l@nbRg/. The way the story goes, Dr. T. attended a seminar. The speaker said "... TrenDELenberg position ..." and there was a shout from the audience: "It's TRENdelenberg!" A little later the position was mentioned again, and again the shout was heard: "It's TRENdelenberg!" The speaker then asked: "Who is that yelling back there anyway?" Answer: "It's TRENdelenberg!" I don't know whether the story's exactly true, but certainly the incorrect stress on /El/ occurs a lot, and not only at the end of the name. I think it is the unfamiliar names which have this incorrect stress. I probably do it myself quite often. I don't think you'll hear EnGELS, but Wiesel is less well known. If a name doesn't seem English, one might try to pronounce it phonetically as if it were from a familiar language -- Spanish, German, French -- and it is at least the popular impression that these languages have much less centralization or schwa-formation in unstressed vowels than does English. Then once the full vowel is chosen, the stress will tend to follow it: so once I've decided that Wiesel is /vizEl/ (seems German, and the popular conception is that German is relatively schwa-free), the stress (AT LEAST secondary stress) will tend to go to the second syllable to keep it from being /viz at l/. I would pronounce Daniel /'d&nj at l/ but I wouldn't know how to pronounce, say, Danyell -- I'd probably guess /d&n'jEl/. Also: perhaps there's influence from French, which at least seems to have last-syllable stress (and which has lots of '-el', '-elle' words) and Spanish. Consider 'cartel', on the TV news all the time. [Here I use & = IPA ash and I don't distinguish @ from unstressed I usually.] There are parallels. In Detroit I knew a street named Devonshire, usually pronounced /'dEv at nSajR/. (There are also Goethe [usually /'gowTi/ with T = theta IIRC] and Freud [/frud/] streets in Detroit.) But in Chicago there is a major street named Devon, virtually always pronounced /d@'vAn/ [A as in Chicago 'pop' /pAp/, 'pa' /pA/]: apparently the general impression is that this street was named after a Frenchman named de Von. -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 20:17:33 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:17:33 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: Mike Salovesh wrote: > > Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > > > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. > > The anthropologist in me can't resist what Lewis Carroll would have > called a contrariwise: > > ... > > It took a very long time for us to accept questions expressed in terms > we simply can't imagine happening in similar circles in the U.S. A > typical example of a statement that would be taken as appropriately > gracious would be something like: > > "Thank you very much for this beautiful gift. It's exactly what I > wanted. How much did it cost you?" > I've had similar experiences. Certain Asian friends would tut-tut about overfamiliarity if I asked someone on brief acquaintance "Are you married?" but persons from the same group had no trouble asking on similar brief acquaintance "How much did you make last year?" .... -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Fri Aug 25 20:12:03 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:12:03 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Herb, I have heard this shift to final syllable in lots of words, not just final -el (most suprisingly, for me, in Hungarian names, by the pretend-cultured announcers on most classical stations, where one regularly hears, e.g., ko-DIE, rather than KO-die - for Kodaly). I propose calling this the psuedo-cultured incorrect stress shift (PISS), and I see no reason to doubt that it is modeled on French for the obvious cultural stereotypes. It's interesting to note that in authentic French loans it's US English (not BritEng) whiich presrves the final syllable stress, e.g., bal-LAY and buh-RAY.) dInIs >A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words >ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or to other >words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal >with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]. > I've regularly heard the conductor Julius Rudel pronounced >[ru'dEl], on a variety of programs on NPR. And a number of years >ago Ball State had a head football coach named Schudel. His wife >is a shirt-tail cousin of my wife, the family's from NW Ohio, near >Toledo, and there the name has always been pronounced ['Sud at l]. >When he was an assistant coach at Michigan, before he came to Ball >State, he found his name so commonly being pronounced [Su'dEl] by >people in football, that he adopted the form and made it clear >when he came here that that was the pronunciation he preferred. >Names that have been around longer seem to have initial stress, >like Joel, although Noel goes both ways, more often [no'El] when >referring to Christmas, but the composer/lyricist is always >['no at l] Coward. Even Joel, when pronounced as a borrowing from >Modern Hebrew, becomes [yo'El], as in the name of the former >conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. > >Other proper nouns have initial stress, like Bethel, Daniel, and >Hazel, although I have heard the occasional [daen'yEl] for the >spelling Daniel. A number of verbs have final stress, but they're >Romance borrowings so that's not surprising: compel, expel, >repel. Nouns and adjectives tend to have initial stress: bagel, >chancel, chisel, counsel, cruel, diesel, dowel, fuel, hazel, >jewel, towel, vowel, but there are exceptions to both patterns, >like cancel (never [kaen'sEl], hotel, motel, and pastel. > >Why is a subset of these words, particularly surnames, undergoing >this stress shift? Is it a spelling pronunciation, that is, final > in names is rare enough that it seems odd and so it gets >stressed, counter to more usual English stress patterns? Why the >football connection? Two or three years ago, there was an >African-American college player on a southern school team with a >four-syllable Scots or Irish name (I don't remember the full name >or whether it was Mac or Mc) that ended in . Network TV >announcers regularly pronounced his name with final stress, a good >trick for an American English four-syllable noun. Is there a >southern pattern coming into this through football? > >Herb Stahlke >Ball State University Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Sat Aug 26 06:30:47 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 01:30:47 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (longposting) Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > There are parallels. In Detroit I knew a street named Devonshire, > usually pronounced /'dEv at nSajR/. (There are also Goethe [usually > /'gowTi/ with T = theta IIRC] and Freud [/frud/] streets in Detroit.) > But in Chicago there is a major street named Devon, virtually always > pronounced /d@'vAn/ [A as in Chicago 'pop' /pAp/, 'pa' /pA/]: > apparently the general impression is that this street was named after > a Frenchman named de Von. The nsme of Chicago's Devon Avenue is a good illustration of more or less recent vowel shifting. Fifty years ago, the most common pronunciation had a lower back vowel in that stressed second syllable: d@'vawn, using aw in place of turned c. I hear the low central A of "pop" or "pa" that Douglas Wilson notes much more from younger speakers than from those whose Chicagoese goes back to the 1940s or earlier. (Back in the 1930s, my home was at 6332 North Richmond; Devon is 6400 north on Chicago's grid plan. I always use the lower back vowel.) You've got Goethe right. Chicago's Goethe Street has an unvoiced theta, but otherwise sounds like "go thee"; the stress is on the first syllable. Pronounce Goethe as in German and you wouldn't be likely to find Goethe Street by asking Chicagoans. Back to Detroit: What was that I heard about José Campau Street? (Excuse the spelling -- I've heard the name, but I haven't seen the street signs.) -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Sat Aug 26 07:07:06 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 09:07:06 +0200 Subject: Gotland greetings: F-word Message-ID: On vendredi 25 août 2000, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av >Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." > > I think "en film av Lukas Moodysson som gjorde Fucking Åmål" >means "a film by Lukas Moodysson, who did 'Fucking Åmål'". The >famous film "Fucking Åmål" was released in the US under >another name ("Show Me Love", I think). I think the English >loan word may be used figuratively/intensively here; Åmål is >the name of a town. See (for example): It may have been released under another name in the States, but I believe in New York it was well-known as "Fucking Amal" (as it is here in Paris). There was some derision towards the New York Times by papers like the Voice for not using the word "fucking" when mentioning, as all the reviewers seemed compelled to do no matter what the paper, that the title had been changed from something more risque (although now I can't find it in the Voice archives). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9941/winter.shtml "Fourteen - year - old Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrüm) harbors a grudge for her Swedish hometown summed up in the film's glorious original title, Fucking Amal — the mercurial mini - Bardot unleashes a barbaric yawp whenever small-town tedium gets the best of her." http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9934/filmpreviews.shtml "Show Me Love Retitled from the infinitely catchier Fucking Amal, this rude, sweet, funny Swedish import, without trying too hard, shames the recent crop of gay coming-of-age flicks. (DL) October 22" -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 4 rue de Chevreuse 75006 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From douglas at NB.NET Sat Aug 26 09:11:59 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 05:11:59 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final ... Streets Message-ID: Mike Salovesh wrote: > > ... Chicago's Devon Avenue is a good illustration of more or > less recent vowel shifting. Fifty years ago, the most common > pronunciation had a lower back vowel in that stressed second syllable: > d@'vawn, using aw in place of turned c. I hear the low central A of > "pop" or "pa" that Douglas Wilson notes much more from younger speakers > than from those whose Chicagoese goes back to the 1940s or earlier. > (Back in the 1930s, my home was at 6332 North Richmond; Devon is 6400 > north on Chicago's grid plan. I always use the lower back vowel.) > > You've got Goethe right. Chicago's Goethe Street has an unvoiced theta, > but otherwise sounds like "go thee"; the stress is on the first > syllable. Pronounce Goethe as in German and you wouldn't be likely to > find Goethe Street by asking Chicagoans. > > Back to Detroit: What was that I heard about José Campau Street? > (Excuse the spelling -- I've heard the name, but I haven't seen the > street signs.) > I remember Chicago and Detroit well from the 1970's. Now that I think of it, I did hear /d@'vOn/ a lot in Chicago [O like IPA reverse-c] ... but I wouldn't have made much distinction, since many Chicago speakers might tend toward /pOp/ 'pop' too, for example ... I think something close to /pOp/ might predominate as close as Peoria or Champaign. The distinction in this respect between Chicago (= Detroit, etc.) and Pittsburgh (e.g.) is that in Chicago 'Don' and 'Dawn' sound different (/dAn/, /dOn/) while in Pittsburgh they sound the same (/dOn/, /dOn/), regardless of the exact sounds employed. Do/did Chicagoans pronounce 'Devon' to rhyme with 'Don' or with 'Dawn'? I think this was variable in my experience. The German looking for Goethe St. wouldn't have any luck in Detroit either. The street in Detroit named after Joseph Campau [a 3rd-generation American of French ancestry, I think] showed something like "Jos. Campau" on its street signs IIRC. Detroiters said "Campau" or "Joseph Campau" or "Joe Campau" (/'k&mpO/ or /'k&mpow/ [& = IPA ash ('ae')] [I use /ow/ = /ou/ or 'long-O']). Only recently and rarely have I encountered the bizarre "José Campau" -- but then I haven't been in Detroit recently. This is the 'main street' of the city ('suburb') of Hamtramck (named after a [German-]French-Canadian immigrant), traditionally 'Polish' (I think once > 80%) -- now a mixed place whose 2nd language may be Arabic rather than Polish. -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 11:06:00 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 07:06:00 EDT Subject: Karlskrona kibbles Message-ID: Greetings from a brief lunch stop in Karlskrona, Sweden. Attached is an e-mail from the FT. They acknowledged their error. I didn't even have to wait eight years for that! WEST COAST SALAD WITH RHODE ISLAND SAUCE--Spotted at several resaurants in Sweden. Rhode Island sauce isn't especially popular in the States! WALENBERGERS VEAL--one offering. PORK FILLET "ANNA LINDBERG"--Spotted once in Gotland, but no one's familiar with it. CAESAR CHICKEN SANDWICH--Offered by the hamburger restaurant Max. Why Caesar--it's not a salad, it's a hamburger! CHICKY BITS--A popular term for chicken nuggets. OPERA PIZZA--Several places in Gotland had this. Tomato, cheese, ham, and tuna fish. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Peter.Whitehead at ft.com (Peter Whitehead) Subject: weekend ft basketball error Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 18:25:10 +0100 Size: 2357 URL: From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Sat Aug 26 12:39:01 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 08:39:01 -0400 Subject: Karlskrona kibbles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is "opera" pizza a joke on "the works"? dInIs > Greetings from a brief lunch stop in Karlskrona, Sweden. >WEST COAST SALAD WITH RHODE ISLAND SAUCE--Spotted at several resaurants in >Sweden. Rhode Island sauce isn't especially popular in the States! > >WALENBERGERS VEAL--one offering. > >PORK FILLET "ANNA LINDBERG"--Spotted once in Gotland, but no one's >familiar with it. > >CAESAR CHICKEN SANDWICH--Offered by the hamburger restaurant Max. Why >Caesar--it's not a salad, it's a hamburger! > >CHICKY BITS--A popular term for chicken nuggets. > >OPERA PIZZA--Several places in Gotland had this. Tomato, cheese, ham, and >tuna fish. Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 19:52:32 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 15:52:32 EDT Subject: Malmo momentos Message-ID: Greetings from Malmo, Sweden. This is the home of Anita Ekberg, but I didn't see her today. Tomorrow I take the bridge (and tunnel) to Copenhagen and then head for home. The Oresund Bridge opened July 1st. I told people here about Steve Brodie and they told me that I can be the very first to jump off this bridge. Thanks! The following is from LOOK AT SWEDEN (SOUTHERN EDITION), no. 3, 2000: Pg. 8, col. 1: Before the sales of the shares, Trade Minister, Bjorn Rosengren asked Ericsson which has 314,000 shareholders the criteria for making a company's shareholding a "folkaktie" ("people's share"). Pg. 24, col. 2: ..."SWD" (She Who Decides)... Pg. 36, col. 1: That every child has a childhood worth being called a childhood is not something we can take for granted, but it is one of the goals of the organization BRIS. (The organization to prevent violence against children is called "BRIS"? As in Jewish circumcision? Was the organizational name "Female Genital Mutilation" taken??--ed) Pg. 81, col. 2: "We want to support locally produced food, and have developed our own label called 'Glassmarkt' (goose marked). Only food products produced and consumed in the Soderslatt region are allowed to wear the mark of the goose." Pg. 83, col. 1: ..."eco-tourist"..."ecotourism"... Pg. 90, col. 1: One of the most commonly known treatments for depression is the so-called "happy pill," or anti-depressive drug. Although the name Prozac quickly comes to mind, the number one anti-depressenat on the market in Sweden and Denmark is in fact Cipramil, produced by Lundbeck in Copenhagen. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 22:40:09 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:40:09 EDT Subject: Malmo drinks Message-ID: Greetings again from Malmo, Sweden. This town is buzzing this Saturday night. And you thought the Swedes didn't drink! ESPRESSO HOUSE The menu for the Espresso House is at www.espressohouse.com. I saw "Mullberg 'Black Coffee'" and "Espressino." "Frappuccino" was also offered. See www.starbucks.com. Isn't "Frappuccino" a registered trademark of Starbucks? PM (PUB & MAT) These drinks were at this place in the town I e-mailed from earlier today: MOCCA KINO--espressomed, mjolk, kakao gradde och riven choklad. BREW HA-HA LATTE--espresso med kakao vis-ad gradde rivenho-ad Baileys kal a Grand Marnier. CANDYSHOT--melo nel turkish. MALMO BAR DRINKS These drinks were spotted on one menu (the place was hopping, but I do this just for the research): DING-A-LING--Absolut vodka, passionfruktsmonin och limejuice. SEXBOMB MELLOPOLITAN--Absolut Mandrin, triple seconin, lime och cranberry juice. PARONLUMUMBA SUMMARSHAKE VAT DROM SEX ON THE BEACH--Absolut vodka, peachmonin, apelsin och cranberry juice. RAZOR TONGUE ORGASM--Absolut vodka, Kahlua, Bailey's och mjolk. DALLAS HAMBURGER I've seen a "Dallasburgare" offered several places. It's "hemlagad pannbiff, Dallassallad, turkad lok." From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 26 23:29:09 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:29:09 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: Another PISS-conforming name: the actor Harvey KeitEL. Herb Stahlke From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 27 01:23:52 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:23:52 -0700 Subject: Full acceptance? Message-ID: In Friday's SF Chronicle, there's an ad from Natural Wonders. The larger type reads, "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" Rima From jester at PANIX.COM Sun Aug 27 01:44:01 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 21:44:01 -0400 Subject: Full acceptance? In-Reply-To: from "Kim & Rima McKinzey" at Aug 26, 2000 06:23:52 PM Message-ID: > In Friday's SF Chronicle, there's an ad from Natural Wonders. The > larger type reads, "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" Cite! Cite! Section number, page number, column! JTS From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 27 06:55:32 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 23:55:32 -0700 Subject: Full acceptance? In-Reply-To: <200008270144.VAA01280@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: >... "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" > >Cite! Cite! Section number, page number, column! San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, 8/25/00, front section, p. A4, column 1. Rima From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Sun Aug 27 08:47:40 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 03:47:40 -0500 Subject: Streets (was "Stress patterns . . .", etc Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > Do/did Chicagoans pronounce > 'Devon' to rhyme with 'Don' or with 'Dawn'? I think this was variable > in my experience. Thanks, Doug, for retroactively justifying some fieldwork I did today. De Kalb, Illinois, is in the middle of its annual Corn Fest, one feature of which was Saturday morning's 10K run. My running days are long since past, but I still participate as a volunteer: I wear a flourescent vest, wave a baton, and stop traffic from interfering with the runners. This year, the 19th annual Corn Fest Run, the event was sanctioned for the first time as a qualifying round for members of the Chicago Area Running Association. That brought 150 runners more than our usual average of arond 400, and it gave me a perfect opportunity to find a dozen Chicagoans about their pronunciation of "Devon Avenue". (Before or after the 10K run, not while they were on the course.) I did two things to keep the data relatively clean. First, I asked them whether they were native Chicagoans, and where they lived in Chicago. (It was no surprise to me that every Chicagoan I interviewed was from the North Side. If it matters, they were either from the Lincoln Park area or from Wrigleyville. Devon Avenue is pretty close to Chicago's northern city limits.) Second, to avoid contaminating their responses with my pronunciation, my eliciting question was framed as "what street is at 6400 north?" All twelve of my informants stressed the second syllable of "Devon". Ten people aged 35 or younger (in my estimation) pronounced the syllable as a rhyme for "don", "upon", "swan", "John", etc. Two whose ages I would estimate as over 60 both rhymed the last syllable with "dawn", "gone", "brawn", etc. After getting a response, I explained to each informant why I had asked. Eight of the younger Chicagoans expressed surprise, one way or another, to hear that anyone would have a turned c vowel in the second syllable. (One of them actually spelled out his reaction: "That sounds like saying the name Vaughn, "Vee Ay Yoo Jee Aitch Enn".) Both my older informants commented that they hear the don-upon-swan-John version lots more nowadays than they did in their youth. Yesterday, on the sole authority of my own feel for the nature of Chicagoese, I suggested that there has been a recent shift from some back vowel to a low central vowel in this environment. I think my Saturday interviews strongly confirm the impression I already had. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 28 16:08:06 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:08:06 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Message-ID: My grandfather brought my surname from the Austro-Hungarian Empire into this country as "Mandelbaum", pronounced 'man.dL.baUm in German and 'm at n.dL.baUm in English. [a = low back unrounded vowel, L = syllabic ell, U = lax high back rounded vowel (here as offglide in diphthong), @ = low front unrounded vowel (ash, aka a-e ligature), period = syllable boundary] My father dropped the last four letters, evidently on entering the Army in WW2. I like to think that it was to avoid sounding German rather than to avoid sounding Jewish. I suppose he changed the stress at the same time, but I have no way of knowing; I only know that it has been m at n.'dEl all my life and I have never heard it any other way within the family. [E = epsilon, low-mid front unrounded vowel] Sometimes strangers mispronounce it 'm at n.dL -- on the phone, a sure indication of spam! Often people misspell it as Mandell with double ell, which is after all a more logical English spelling of this pronunciation. The surname is fairly common in the US*, and in my experience always pronounced as we pronounce it, never with initial stress. * See http://world.std.com/~mam/ , and especially http://world.std.com/~mam/why-a-test.html and http://world.std.com/~mam/index.html#not . -- Mark Mandel (rhymes with "can spell") From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 28 04:53:43 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:53:43 +0800 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:08 PM -0400 8/28/00, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: >My grandfather brought my surname from the Austro-Hungarian Empire into >this country as "Mandelbaum", pronounced > 'man.dL.baUm >in German and > 'm at n.dL.baUm >in English. [a = low back unrounded vowel, L = syllabic ell, U = lax high >back rounded vowel (here as offglide in diphthong), @ = low front unrounded >vowel (ash, aka a-e ligature), period = syllable boundary] > >My father dropped the last four letters, evidently on entering the Army in >WW2. I like to think that it was to avoid sounding German rather than to >avoid sounding Jewish. I suppose he changed the stress at the same time, >but I have no way of knowing; I only know that it has been > m at n.'dEl >all my life and I have never heard it any other way within the family. [E >= epsilon, low-mid front unrounded vowel] > >Sometimes strangers mispronounce it > 'm at n.dL >-- on the phone, a sure indication of spam! Often people misspell it as > Mandell >with double ell, which is after all a more logical English spelling of this >pronunciation. > >The surname is fairly common in the US*, and in my experience always >pronounced as we pronounce it, never with initial stress. Well, he could have anglicized it to Almondtree, but then everyone would have had to decide whether or not to pronounce the L. Curiously, I've only ever heard the geneticist Gregory Mendel's name pronounced 'mEn.dL, but maybe everyone knows he was Austrian or whatever. I'm not sure the double-LL really helps either. The Mets have a relief pitcher named Turk Wendell and I've heard it pronounced with each stress pattern about half the time. (I think he actually pronounces it to rhyme with Mendel.) On the other hand, the last name of the linguist Bill Cantrell is always pronounced with final stress, possibly even by himself. L From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 28 16:59:44 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:59:44 EDT Subject: Ellis's SLANGUAGE is horrible!! (continued) Message-ID: Mike Ellis's SLANGUAGE (August 2000 publication; see also www.slanguage.com) is horrible!! It's 266 pages, $14.00. There is no bibliography. There is no mention of the American Dialect Society. There is no mention of the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN REGIONAL ENGLISH. There is no mention of the RANDOM HOUSE HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG. There is no mention of Paul Dickson. Much of the slang is ancient stuff that no one uses anymore (if anyone ever did). "New York" is on pages 80-83. The nicknames of NYC are: "N'Yawk, Big Apple, Center of the Univoice." Ellis then gives such NYC slang terms are "Silicone Alley." He doesn't even know it's SILICON Alley! This guy once wrote on slang for the NY Times! Check out the Amazon.com reviews. Three of three reviewers gave the book five stars--the highest rating! Curiously, two different people wrote the same long review! It's stated on Amazon.com that Mike Ellis is doing regional slang placemats for McDonald's. This should be a nice break for the Dictionary of American Regional English. We should all approach McDonald's and tell them the story. The Dictionary of American Regional English is scholarly. It's unfinished. It needs funding. Its founder has recently died. Instead of the Ellis crap, wouldn't McDonald's want to do something GOOD?? You can even through in my "hamburger" and "hot dog" research for free. If we're not successful with McDonald's (Your kind of place?), try Burger King! From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Mon Aug 28 17:10:30 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:10:30 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Message-ID: In one of James Garner's lesser performances, the Hallmark TV movie Decoration Day, there is a southern character named Wendell, and it's always [wen'del]. Of course, everyone in the film, Garner included, has a studied southern accent. Herb Stahlke >>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 08/27/00 11:53PM >>> Well, he could have anglicized it to Almondtree, but then everyone would have had to decide whether or not to pronounce the L. Curiously, I've only ever heard the geneticist Gregory Mendel's name pronounced 'mEn.dL, but maybe everyone knows he was Austrian or whatever. I'm not sure the double-LL really helps either. The Mets have a relief pitcher named Turk Wendell and I've heard it pronounced with each stress pattern about half the time. (I think he actually pronounces it to rhyme with Mendel.) On the other hand, the last name of the linguist Bill Cantrell is always pronounced with final stress, possibly even by himself. L From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 28 17:48:12 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 13:48:12 EDT Subject: Copenhagen food & drink Message-ID: Greetings from a rainy New York City...It should have been "throw in" (not "through in") in that last post on SLANGUAGE. I was in Copenhagen yesterday. MAMA ROSA'S CANTINA (a Tex-Mex/Italian restaurant just off the main walking street) Coffee: Mexikansk Koffe (tequila, kahlua); Irish Coffee (whiskey); Jamaican Coffee (Tia Maria, creme de cacao); Italiensk Kaffe (sambuco); Fransk Kaffe (cognac); Bailey's med Kaffe (Bailey's); Amerikansk Kaffe. Drinks: Margarita del Ray; Margarita de Fresa; Maragarita Kiwi; San Fransisco; Factory Pina Colada; Caribbean Cooler; Blue Hawaii; Tequila Sunrise; Kirr; Martini Bianco; Martini Rosso; Martini Dry. RESTAURANT TROJKA Trojkas Kaffe--med vodka + flodeskum. CAFE AMADEUS (OTTO'S KITCHEN) (Allan Otto is advertised as the Master of Danish Food) Danish salami; Danish lamb; Danish liver pate; Danish hacked beef; Old Danish cheese with whiskey; Danish herring. IDA DAVIDSEN (OSKAR DAVIDSEN was established in 1888 and was famous for smorrebrod) The Veterinarian's Breakfast--rye bread with butter, liver pate, lard, consomme aspic, Danish salami, onion, dill. The Veterinarian's Supper--rye bread with butter, liver pate, lard, consomme aspic, saltbeef, onion, dill. The Electrician's Supper--rye bread with butter, salted pork cutlet, sauteed onions, apple, gravy. Hans Christian Andersen--rye bread with butter, crispy bacon, liver pate, consomme aspic, horseradish, parsley. Per Hendriksen--rye bread with butter, egg, tomato, cucumber, onion, mayonnaise, dill, raw egg yolk. Clipper--rye bread with butter, hand scraped beef tartare, caviar, smoked salmon, raw egg yolk. 7-11 Served scones, frosnapper prommebolle, wienerslojfe, kamme, croissant. (No Danish.) HERCEGOVINA RESTAURANT Cevapcici (minced meat) Pljeskavica (hamburger steak) BALI RESTAURANT Cocktail "Bali Punch"--Rom + blended appelsin + og ananas juice. DSB CAFE & MINIBAR (in train station) Haps Dog; Chili Dog; Luksus Frankfurter; American CheeseDog; Wienerbrod (no "Danish"); Croissant; Rundstykke; Kager; Friskbagte (muffins m/chokolade el blabaer); Ice Tea (Nestea is also "Ice Tea" here). BURGERE (burger shack) Big Dane clasic; Big Dane cheese; Big Dane bacon; Big Dane chicken; Big Dane devil (?); Big Dane garlic. MISC.: CHRISTIANSOSILD--herrings from the "Christian island." COUPE DANMARK--vanilla ice with chokolatesauce. STJERNESKUD--fried fish fillet, steamed fish fillet + prawns, served with salad on toasted bread. BEEF SKINDBUKGEN (steak) PAMIX A DANISH SPECIALTY (bits of steak) "DANISH" & THE WHITE HOUSE (continued) My congressperson is Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D). She is a good friend of both President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Maloney visits the White House often. The White House is often called "the people's house." As stated before, it might have been a White House chef (from Copenhagen) who gave us the "Danish." Rather than e-mail a swamped White House staff, I e-mailed my congresswoman and asked her if there was a White House historian who can help me find out about the White House chefs and White House menus. I said that I was a scholar who lived in her district, and that I've given a lot to my city and to my country. As ADS-L readers know by now, in my experience, unless you give politicians money, your elected representatives don't do ANYTHING for you at all. Congresswoman Maloney never responded. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 29 01:46:16 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 21:46:16 EDT Subject: Front-Running; Pink Sheets; DotTony Message-ID: FRONT-RUNNING From the WALL STREET JOURNAL, 28 August 2000, pg. C1, cols. 3-5: _Stock Prices Switch to Decimals From Fractions,_ _Raising Concern ABout "Front-Running" by Pros_ When the long-awaited switch to decimal from fractional stock prices in the U.S. begins today, most investors expect to benefit from narrower bid/ask spreads. But there is a potential dark side to the swtich that many investors may be unaware of. WIth stocks quoted in dollars and cents, it will mean that for as little as one cent a share, Wall Street pros will be able to step in front of public orders--in what some, including the president of the New York Stock Exchange, say amounts to "front-running." (...) A professional--a stock exchange specialist, a market maker on Nasdaq or the investor's own broker--might decide that the presence of a big buyer at $20 suggests the stock is a good buy, and "steps in front" by bidding a little more for the 500 shares. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- PINK SHEETS No, not my new bed spread. From the NEW YORK OBSERVER, "Back of the Envelope" column by Christopher Byron, August 28-September 4, 2000, pg. 32, col. 1: This is the type of individual one encounters more and more these days in what has become a whole new and growing area of abuse on Wall Street--the so-called "pink sheets" sector of the old Over the Counter market. (...) Yet nearly 5,000 penny-stock companies have escaped the crackdown by simply refusing to file audited financials. In so doing, they've become so-called non-filers that are now publicly quoted over the Internet on an electronic system maintained by the Naitonal Quotation Bureau, which has recently renamed itself Pink Sheets LLC. (...) Mr. Baldridge, the registered sex offender, comes up in all this in connection with a number of different companies that have lately been jumping in the "pinks." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DOT TONY THE OBSERVER (London), 27 August 2000, Comment by Jamie Doward, pg. 3 (Business section), cols. 6-8: _How dotTony's kiss_ _killed off Alta Vista_ Prime Minister Tony Blair is called "dotTony" because of his constant pushing of New Economy business for Britain. Dot-com companies haven't fared well in old England in recent weeks. This would make more sense, though, if the leader's name were Dorothy. From lex at W-STS.COM Tue Aug 29 05:22:22 2000 From: lex at W-STS.COM (Amy West) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:22:22 -0700 Subject: job announcement Message-ID: The company that I'm currently freelancing for is looking for some additional help. The ad is posted on Monster.com. This is the same company that was written about in the Wall Street Journal this summer. They've moved to some nice digs in Cambridge, MA. ---Amy West US-MA-Cambridge-Lexicographer US-MA-Cambridge-Lexicographer Lexeme Inc., a fast growing natural language company, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is seeking to hire computational lexicographers to join its development group. You will be assisting in the development of the knowledge resources, working within a multidisciplinary team of linguists, engineers and programmers. Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to, the following: * Analyze text corpora in different linguistic domains; * Assist in developing and extending lexical databases; * Contribute to the creation of automatic tools for lexicographic projects; * Assist in testing and evaluating the contribution of the knowledge resources to the overall system. We are looking for people who enjoy working within a team in a fast-paced environment. The ideal candidate must be able to play an active role in the group by combining independent and creative thinking with specific project needs and deadlines. The minimal requirement is a university degree with a background in linguistics or lexicography or at least a very good knowledge of basic grammatical concepts. Lexeme will provide training on the job as well as through lectures and technical documentation. Programming experience is not required but it is a plus. Competitive salary. Additional Information Position Type: Full Time, Permanent Contact Information Joan Shulman jobs at lexeme.com Lexeme, Inc. 585 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139 Ph: 508-358-4655 Fax: 508-358-4655 From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Tue Aug 29 19:27:49 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 21:27:49 +0200 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Herb Stahlke writes: "A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or two other words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]..." Like Dennis R. Preston, "I see no reason to doubt that it is modeled on French for the obvious cultural stereotypes", at least not in many cases. This is certainly true for , which, by the way, is how members of the Nobel family pronounce their name. Thus, in this case, the stress is not a recent development in American English, but a perfectly correct pronunciation. In Sweden, there are many other names ending in -el or -ell (e.g. Sergel, Mankell, Kernell, von Dardel, de Dardel), but the spelling gives no clue to the stress: <'sEr.gel> or , <'mAn.kel>, , , . You simply have to know. In other cases, the American stress change is certainly due to a lack of knowledge of the pronunciation in the original language (e.g. Trendelenberg), sometimes adopted even by the bearers of the name, e.g. the CNN news anchor Mr. Begleiter, pronounced by everyone on the channel (thus presumably by himself) <'bEg.lai.ter>, even though the German prefix be- is always unstressed. Jan Ivarsson, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 29 20:23:42 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 16:23:42 EDT Subject: Australian word: whinge Message-ID: >From _The Australian_ http://news.com.au:80/common/story_page/0,4057,1130556%255E1683,00.html All whinge and no action defines who we are By SUSAN MITCHELL 28aug00 IN this land of "no worries", next to a good laugh we love to have a whinge. Sometimes it can go on for days; weeks, even. Often it's the same whinge, told to as many different ears as we can bash. Whinging in Australia is a form of bonding. Nothing like a shared whinge to make you feel less alone in this vast country. Perhaps that's why we love it so much. Perhaps it came over with the first white inhabitants. No doubt the first thing they did was have a whinge about the heat and the flies. The Macquarie Dictionary defines a whinger as someone who complains or whines. The whine element is important because it involves a nasal sound peculiar to our accent. It also means "to complain in a feeble, plaintive way". . . . . All of this helps explain the launch of a new website, Whinger.com, which promises "your whinge is our command". LOG on, have a good whinge and for $8.25 the company will contact the source of your complaint, attempt to get something in return -- like a free meal or a free lube from a garage or an apology. If it doesn't, it will stick the offender on the website for public humiliation. . . . . - Allan Metcalf From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Tue Aug 29 22:56:53 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 17:56:53 -0500 Subject: foutre In-Reply-To: <199906230310.UAA20318@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Toward the end of May, 1823, New York City was stood on its ear by excitement over a horserace. A troop of outstanding racers were brought into the city from Virginia, headed by a horse named Sir Henry and including a horse named Flying Childers. They were to be matched against horses from the north, Sir Henry to be challenged by a horse named Eclipse. (Flying Childers and Eclipse both had borrowed their names from famous 18th century English horses.) Extraordingary sums were said to have been bet. The New York newspapers were full of the story, both during the race meet and for a week or more before. One paper said that the population of the town had been doubled by the number of people who had come to see the event. Another amused its readers by picturing these visitors trundling their luggage down the streets, knocking on every door with a sign "Boarders Taken" in the window, and finding that all beds were bespoken. Another paper published a whimsical letter from "A Yankee" describing the excitement. The letter represented a French barber exclaiming "foutre, foutre, Eclipse, bon Flying Childers." Now, I believe that "foutre" does not have the resonance to the French that its English equivalent has -- or had -- to Americans. Just the same, I am surprised to see "foutre" in print in a general circulation newspaper at that date. I would suppose that a reasonable number of the New Yorkers likely to subscribe to a newspaper would know the word, and would naturally translate it as "fuck" and find it offensive. It is possible that A Yankee was playing a prank on the newspaper editor and taking advantage of his ignorance. But I noticed nothing in subsequent days in this paper nor in several rival papers expressing apologies, or indignation, or any other reaction. It's also true that these newspapers offer 2 or 3 square feet of often one sentence or one paragraph stories in small type and without headlines, so stuff is very easy to miss. Have any of the lexicographers among us anything in their files to indicate when "foutre" or its derivitives, like "foutu" or "Je m'en foutisme" first found their way into respectable English language publications? I notice that the OED has "Je m'en fous" from an Arnold Bennett novel of 1928. The source of this passaage was The Statesman, May 26, 1823, p. 2, col. 4 GAT From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Tue Aug 29 23:29:07 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 18:29:07 -0500 Subject: Americanisms, 1823 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In 1823, the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser copied "A Provincial Dictionary for the convenience of Emigrants" from the Mississippi Intelligencer. This glossary was reprinted in American Dialect Notes. vol. 4, pp. 46-48, as taken from the National Intelligencer of May 1, 1823. It is in two sections: Western Dialect (31 words, many merely variant pronunciations, like barr, crap and drap, for bear, crop and drop, but also fanent, opposite; pater, to amble along; carry, to lead a quadruped; and coppen, the enclosure within which milch-cows are kept) and Yankee Dialect (19 words, including spatter, a comparative word, "as thick as spatter".) A week later, the NYGGA printed an very interesting letter signed "Philologus" in response to this glossary. He cites 11 of the words, with the definitions, and indicates that all are to be found in either Bailey's or Johnson's dictionaries. In short, they are not Americanisms, but English provincialisms. He further observes "'Fanent, opposite' . . . is used . . . only by emigrants from the North of Ireland." This agrees with the note in DARE (under fornent). Suspecting that this glossary had been compiled by one of those tiresome Englishmen who come over here hunting for instances of American barbarity to send to the folks back home and confirm them in their prejudices, Philologus gives a list of words "made use of in [England], which are probably little known here. These I extract from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in London for the benefit of his majesty's subjects in general." He chooses 28 words, including fubsey, plump, (which Greg Downing, at least, will remember as part of Stephen Dedalus's vocabulary) gob, the mouth, and glum, sullen. Presumably the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is not the original mid-18th century edition by Francis Grose, but is Pierce Egan's version of 1823; if so, Philologus had obtained a copy very promptly. If other copies were available in the U. S., then the authenticity, as a demonstration of American familiarity with English slang, of the essay from the mid 1820s in corinthian slang I've posted here some time back, would be questionable. The "Provincial Dictionary" was in the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, May 10, 1823; the letter from Philologus was in NYGGA, May 16, 1823, p. 2, cols. 2-3. GAT From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Wed Aug 30 00:24:46 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 20:24:46 -0400 Subject: Americanisms, 1823 Message-ID: At 06:29 PM 8/29/2000, George Thompson () wrote: >...Philologus gives a list of words "made use of in >[England], which are probably little known here. These I extract >from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in London for the >benefit of his majesty's subjects in general." He chooses 28 words, >including fubsey, plump, (which Greg Downing, at least, will remember >as part of Stephen Dedalus's vocabulary) gob, the mouth, and glum, >sullen. "Plump" is definitely part of the narrator's vocabulary, though not necessarily Stephen's, in the passage to which you refer (the book's incipit). Actually, fubsy (sic), gob, and glum all occur in the book. Isn't it a well-known fact that the whole of OED1 is in _Ulysses_, unhelpfully jumbled out of alphabetical order? There's even that big patch of Americanisms in the coda to episode 14, a passage I discussed at some length as part of the Zurich Joyce Center workshop week earlier this month. I trust all's going well with you, George. Best, Greg D. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 02:27:46 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 22:27:46 -0400 Subject: foutre Message-ID: GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > > ... > > Have any of the lexicographers among us anything in their files to > indicate when "foutre" or its derivitives, like "foutu" or "Je m'en > foutisme" first found their way into respectable English language > publications? I notice that the OED has "Je m'en fous" from an > Arnold Bennett novel of 1928. > The OED quotes Shakespeare, "Henry IV", 1597: "A foutre for the world ...". There is an earlier citation, but it seems to be in French. [I note that there is a piece in the 'classical' piano repertoire -- by Rossini? -- in which the score calls for the pianist to say "foutre" a few times. I don't know just how offensive this would have been, there and then.] Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I don't give a hoot"? (^_^) -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 30 10:11:21 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 03:11:21 -0700 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: If it's not too late to respond to this: semantic shift occurs when a word's original meaning changes completly. When a word's meaning is expanded to include not only its original meaning, but additional meaning, the process is known as *broadening*. --- Kathleen Miller wrote: > > Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese > and we're stuck with a > lingusitic question. What is it called when a > phrase, such as "get out of > here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic > shift, or is there another > name for it? > > > Kathleen E. Miller > Research Assistant to William Safire > The New York Times > > "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It > is only with the heart > that one can see rightly; what is essential is > invisible to the > eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 30 11:19:16 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 07:19:16 -0400 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Doesn't it also include narrowing and perhaps another category--transfer--in which the application of the term is taken over to a new category of activity? Some people may call the first two generalization and specialization. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 30 10:41:34 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 06:41:34 EDT Subject: Chastity Timer; Big Apple--Top of the Barrel Message-ID: CHASTITY TIMER From the NEW YORK POST, 29 August 2000, "High-tech chastity belt: It's about 'time,'" pg. 5, col. 1: The electronic device--attached to the elastic of a regular pair of men's or women's underpants--records the frequency and length of time an undergarment (Col. 2--ed.) is removed, London's Guardian newspaper reported. (...) The device, called a "chastity timer," would have an exact record of the period of time during which a person might have been cheating. What'll they think of next? How did we ever live without this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BIG APPLE--TOP OF THE BARREL Gerald Cohen surely doesn't want all this. From the MAIL AND EXPRESS (NY), 26 September 1885, pg. 5, col. 4: (Big Apple drawing--ed.) This is an apple, large and round. At the top of the barrel always found. (Small Apple drawing--ed.) This is an apple, small and mean. Always at the bottom seen. --_Bridgewater Independent_. This item also made several other papers. I have similar observations to this in later years. "Big Apples" are "top of the barrel." According to Christine Ammer's AHDOI, "top of the barrel" and "(scrape the) bottom of the barrel" didn't come around until the early 1900s. I have no idea what Fred Shapiro has. "King Apple" was a 1923 article I recently found in AMERICAN COOKERY. The history of apples was given. There was a paragraph about apples in New York City restaurants. No "Big Apple." The NEW YORK HOTEL RECORD (together with the RESTAURANT WORLD) specifically covered New York City restaurants and hotels. "Peet Tells the Apple Pack Story," 23 November 1923, pg. 5+, was a nice, long article about upstate New York apple growing and New York City apple eating. No "Big Apple." Again: Two months ago, the New York Times's official position was that John J. Fitz Gerald "AT MOST, popularized the phrase." I was told that "NYC=Big Apple" was widely known since 1909. I was told that I deserved no apology whatsoever. Will that change in about two weeks? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 12:40:32 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 13:40:32 +0100 Subject: Australian word: whinge Message-ID: > From: AAllan at AOL.COM > >From _The Australian_ > http://news.com.au:80/common/story_page/0,4057,1130556%255E1683,00.html > > All whinge and no action defines who we are > By SUSAN MITCHELL > 28aug00 > > IN this land of "no worries", next to a good laugh we love to have a whinge. > Sometimes it can go on for days; weeks, even. Often it's the same whinge, > told to as many different ears as we can bash. 'Whinge' isn't an Australian word--it's general British English. I first learnt it in South Africa. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jessie at SIRSI.COM Wed Aug 30 15:01:07 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 10:01:07 -0500 Subject: whinge Message-ID: This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when "whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. Jessie Emerson From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 30 15:01:11 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:01:11 -0400 Subject: whinge In-Reply-To: <006201c01293$20629d00$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> from "Jessie Emerson" at Aug 30, 2000 10:01:07 AM Message-ID: > This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when > "whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, > but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. OED records it from a1150.... Jesse Sheidlower From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 03:17:57 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:17:57 +0800 Subject: "skivvies" (cross-post from Linguist List) Message-ID: f.y.i. Please send comments to the poster (Mr. Wilson, at the address below) as well as to ads-l. larry ------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-11-1819. Tue Aug 29 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875. Subject: 11.1819, Qs: Etymology of "Skivvies",Survey on Spanish ======= Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 06:38:30 -0400 From: "Douglas G. Wilson" Subject: Etymology of the word "Skivvies" I am researching the etymology and connections of the word 'skivvies'/'skivvy' = 'underwear'. I have consulted the major dictionaries (none of which gives even a speculative etymology) and conventional reference books, and I've searched the Web. I have seen various spellings: 'scivey', 'skibbies', etc. This word is perhaps more interesting than one might think initially. Can anyone help me? In particular, has there been a thorough examination of this word in the published literature? The word 'skivvies' in the sense '(naval) underwear' goes back at least to 1927 in the US. 'Skivvy' is also used for 'pullover' (shirt/sweater), particularly in Australia. The singular noun 'skivvy' apparently = 'T-shirt' in the US Navy. Possible connections/conflations include: 'skivvy' = 'flunky' ('menial laborer') [mostly non-US, ca. 1900 to date] 'Skib'/'Skibby' = 'Jap[anese]' [derogatory US military slang, WW II] 'skibby'/'skippy' = 'Asian prostitute' [US slang, from early 1900's] 'skippy'/'skibby' = '[effeminate] homosexual [man]' [US slang] '[get] the skivvy on ...' = '[get] the skinny on ...' = '[get] the facts on ...' [US slang] 'skivvy girl' = ? [US military slang, Vietnam] 'skivvy house' = 'whorehouse' [US military slang] 'skivvy niners' = US Air Force intelligence unit personnel (including linguists!) [USAF slang] 'skivvies' = 'sandals'/'slippers' (?= 'scuffies') [US slang] etc., etc. I would be interested in information on any of these items and any similar ones. At least one possible connection outside the English language suggests itself. Specific questions: (1) Is there (or was there ever) a slang expression 'skivvy' meaning something like 'swabby' or 'sailor'? (2) Was "Skivvies" ever *used* as a trademark (registered or not) for underwear? If so, when, where, and by whom? I will present a summary. - Doug Wilson From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 15:21:48 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 16:21:48 +0100 Subject: whinge In-Reply-To: <006201c01293$20629d00$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: >This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when >"whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, >but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. > >Jessie Emerson I think we actually had this conversation before when I was in SA (we repeat ourselves a lot here, don't we?). It goes back to Middle English--OED has citations back to and fairly continuously from 1150. This isn't a new word. Lynne -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 03:29:24 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:29:24 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <39AC7122.4050502@nb.net> Message-ID: At 10:27 PM -0400 8/29/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I >don't give a hoot"? (^_^) > Not sure; this is one of an indefinitely large catalogue of expressions of minimal quantity used (in English and many other languages) in negative polarity contexts as what Bolinger called 'stereotyped equivalents of ANY'. The OED isn't sure, either, suggesting a possible link with either the owl's interjectional hoot or the noun denoting 'a short outcry', attested since 1600, but it also signals a connection with "hooter", attested earlier in the same range of negative contexts, including the following. (Note that the 1839 citation includes two polarity items in the same expression.) 1839 Havana (N.Y.) Republican 21 Aug. (Th.), Now the Grampus [sc. a vessel] stopt, and didn't buge [= budge] one hooter. 1889 Commercial (Cincinnati) 17 Oct., It has not harmed the Republican cause in Ohio a hooter. 1896 Harper's Mag. XCII. 784/1 Now I can have all I want, I don't care a hooter! 1900 E. A. Dix Deacon Bradbury xii, `Do you mean that you don't know anything about the matter at all?'..`Not a hooter.' as for "hoot" itself, the first cite in the OED for the relevant item (hoot-2) is the only one that does not include a negative context, for what it's worth: 1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds xxxviii. 615, I got onto my reaper and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night. larry From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 15:37:51 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:37:51 -0400 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:29 AM 8/30/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 10:27 PM -0400 8/29/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >>Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I >>don't give a hoot"? (^_^) >Not sure; this is one of an indefinitely large catalogue of >expressions of minimal quantity used (in English and many other >languages) in negative polarity contexts as what Bolinger called >'stereotyped equivalents of ANY'. The OED isn't sure, either, >suggesting a possible link with either the owl's interjectional hoot >or the noun denoting 'a short outcry', attested since 1600, but it >also signals a connection with "hooter", attested earlier in the same >range of negative contexts, including the following. (Note that the >1839 citation includes two polarity items in the same expression.) > >1839 Havana (N.Y.) Republican 21 Aug. (Th.), Now the Grampus [sc. a >vessel] stopt, and didn't buge [= budge] one hooter. > >1889 Commercial (Cincinnati) 17 Oct., It has not harmed the >Republican cause in Ohio a hooter. > >1896 Harper's Mag. XCII. 784/1 Now I can have all I want, I don't >care a hooter! > >1900 E. A. Dix Deacon Bradbury xii, `Do you mean that you don't know >anything about the matter at all?'..`Not a hooter.' > >as for "hoot" itself, the first cite in the OED for the relevant item >(hoot-2) is the only one that does not include a negative context, >for what it's worth: > >1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds xxxviii. 615, I got onto my reaper >and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night. > >larry Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration of 'foutre'? Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. -- Doug Wilson From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 04:11:04 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 12:11:04 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000830113137.00a88a60@nb.net> Message-ID: At 11:37 AM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration >of 'foutre'? > >Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. > >But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional >references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. > No reason to doubt it, and no particular reason to believe it, without further evidence. As I mentioned in my last note, there are hundreds of nouns that occur or have occurred in the frame "X doesn't care/give a ___" and their semantic and phonological range is impressively wide. "Fout(re)" isn't particularly closer phonologically to "hoot" than, say, "jot" is, and obscenities like 'fuck', 'shit', and 'damn' constitute just one of many sources of such minima. I'm not saying your derivation is impossible, I'm just saying that there are alternate explanations and, as far as I know, no particular evidence for yours. (Incidentally, the "fuck all" construction you cite isn't relevant, unless you can find "I don't know {hoot(er) all/ foutre all} about it" as well.) larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 30 17:09:12 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 13:09:12 EDT Subject: Brand Trains Message-ID: From the VILLAGE VOICE, 29 August 2000, pg. 28, col. 1: When a company swallows halves of subway cars and plasters them with identical ads, the biz calls these "brand trains." Tristate tech start-ups shell out $150,000 apiece for monthly placement in a single car on 10 percent of the city's fleet. That seems expensive to me. You have to sell a lot of "Fruitopia" (one campaign that ran in the subway) to cover it. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 17:19:12 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 18:19:12 +0100 Subject: Brand Trains In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Barry said: > From the VILLAGE VOICE, 29 August 2000, pg. 28, col. 1: > > When a company swallows halves of subway cars and plasters them >with identical ads, the biz calls these "brand trains." Tristate >tech start-ups shell out $150,000 apiece for monthly placement in a >single car on 10 percent of the city's fleet. > > That seems expensive to me. You have to sell a lot of >"Fruitopia" (one campaign that ran in the subway) to cover it. No, you just have to sell a lot of Coca-Cola, since they own Fruitopia. And since they already sell a lot of Coke, they can afford ridiculous campaigns for their smaller brands. Incidentally, Coke was sued by a group of high school students who had come up with the ideas behind Fruitopia (including the name) in some sort of teen enterprise class (or camp or something) that was peopled with Coke reps. I think the kids won. -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 18:11:12 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:11:12 -0400 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:11 PM 8/30/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 11:37 AM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >> >>Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration >>of 'foutre'? >> >>Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. >> >>But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional >>references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. >No reason to doubt it, and no particular reason to believe it, >without further evidence. As I mentioned in my last note, there are >hundreds of nouns that occur or have occurred in the frame >"X doesn't care/give a ___" >and their semantic and phonological range is impressively wide. >"Fout(re)" isn't particularly closer phonologically to "hoot" than, >say, "jot" is, and obscenities like 'fuck', 'shit', and 'damn' >constitute just one of many sources of such minima. I'm not saying >your derivation is impossible, I'm just saying that there are >alternate explanations and, as far as I know, no particular evidence >for yours. (Incidentally, the "fuck all" construction you cite isn't >relevant, unless you can find "I don't know {hoot(er) all/ foutre >all} about it" as well.) Well, it's only a speculation off the top of my head, and I am not trying to sell it too strongly. However ... (1) "I don't give ...": In my own experience, the likely choices include "a damn" (plus euphemisms "a darn" etc.), "a shit", "two shits", "a f*ck", "a rat's ass", "a hoot", "two hoots", etc. All rude, except for "hoot" .... I don't hear "a jot", "a tittle", "a peep", "a squeak", etc., in this expression. I think there's some tendency to want a rude expression here, rather than a diminutive or an animal sound. [Incidentally, "not give a damn" is thought by some to derive from "not give a dam", a dam being a small unit of currency in India. Is this derivation legitimate, or is it an elevated type of 'folk etymology'?] (2) I think "fout[re]" is closer to "hoot[er]" than other things such as "jot" are. [But perhaps I'm influenced by Japanese, where 'fu' and 'hu' are absolutely identical (with bilabial 'f') ... Does bilabial 'f' occur in some varieties of French, BTW?] (3) "F*ck all" is not analogous word-for-word, but it's another example of the popular desire for a rude word in a certain context. "He doesn't know ..." (intensive) is filled (in my experience) by "shit" ("diddly", "doodly", "squat", "beans" euphemisms for this, I think), "f*ck all" (occasionally "f*ck" alone), "bugger all", etc. Perhaps "zilch", "zip" are exceptions, perhaps partly euphemisms. For those sensitive individuals who object not only to rude words but also to their transparent euphemisms, 'hoot' might be the only polite way to fill "I don't give a ..." -- perhaps because 'foutre' is no longer recognizable to the average English-speaker, so that 'hoot' is no longer recognized as its alteration or euphemism. Next time I get over to the big library, I'll see if I can find any convincing substantiation or refutation of my tentative hypothesis! -- Doug From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 07:13:38 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 15:13:38 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000830123359.00a92200@nb.net> Message-ID: At 2:11 PM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >Well, it's only a speculation off the top of my head, and I am not trying >to sell it too strongly. However ... > >(1) "I don't give ...": In my own experience, the likely choices include "a >damn" (plus euphemisms "a darn" etc.), "a shit", "two shits", "a f*ck", "a >rat's ass", "a hoot", "two hoots", etc. All rude, except for "hoot" .... I >don't hear "a jot", "a tittle", "a peep", "a squeak", etc., in this >expression. I think there's some tendency to want a rude expression here, >rather than a diminutive or an animal sound. > >[Incidentally, "not give a damn" is thought by some to derive from "not >give a dam", a dam being a small unit of currency in India. Is this >derivation legitimate, or is it an elevated type of 'folk etymology'?] > >(2) I think "fout[re]" is closer to "hoot[er]" than other things such as >"jot" are. [But perhaps I'm influenced by Japanese, where 'fu' and 'hu' are >absolutely identical (with bilabial 'f') ... Does bilabial 'f' occur in >some varieties of French, BTW?] > >(3) "F*ck all" is not analogous word-for-word, but it's another example of >the popular desire for a rude word in a certain context. "He doesn't know >..." (intensive) is filled (in my experience) by "shit" ("diddly", >"doodly", "squat", "beans" euphemisms for this, I think), "f*ck all" >(occasionally "f*ck" alone), "bugger all", etc. Perhaps "zilch", "zip" are >exceptions, perhaps partly euphemisms. > >For those sensitive individuals who object not only to rude words but also >to their transparent euphemisms, 'hoot' might be the only polite way to >fill "I don't give a ..." -- perhaps because 'foutre' is no longer >recognizable to the average English-speaker, so that 'hoot' is no longer >recognized as its alteration or euphemism. > OK, I'm open to persuasion. But I thought we were talking about how these expressions evolved rather than which expressions are likely to be uttered today, so the evidence I was alluding to is germane. This discussion is reproduced from my 1989 book, _A Natural History of Negation_, p. 400: =============== Minimizers, those 'partially stereotyped equivalents of any' (Bolinger 1972: 121; cf. 6.4 above), occur within the scope of a negation as a way of reinforcing that negation. As far back as Pott (1857: 410), linguists have recognized this function of positive expressions denoting small or negligeable quantities, often incorporating a sense of scorn or ridicule, which Pott sees as implicitly evoking the formula nicht einmal das 'not even...'; cf. also Schmerling 1971, Horn 1971, Fauconnier 1975a,b, Heim 1984. Impressive, though hardly exhaustive, inventories of NPI minimizers specialized for this function are given by Pott (1857: 410-11) and Wagenaar (1930: 74-5). Their examples--from Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Old Spanish, Italian, English, Dutch, German, and Slavic--include minimal quantities from the culinary domain (= 'not a cherrystone, a chestnut, a crumb, an egg, a fava, a fig, a garlic, a grain, a leek, an oyster, a parsnip, a pea,...'), coins of little value (='not a dinero, sou,...' [cf. not a red cent, plugged nickel, thin dime]), animals and body parts (='not a cat's tail, a hair, a mosquito, a lobster[!], a sparrow'), and other objects of little value and/or salience (='not an accent , an atom, a nail, a pinecone, a point, a shred, a splinter, a straw'). Indeed, it would appear that any entity whose extension is small enough to be regarded as atomic in an accessible set of contexts can be used productively in this frame as a means of negative reinforcement. Nor is this tendency by any means restricted to Indo-European. Negative-polarity minimizers occur as negation strengtheners in Basque (cf. Lafitte 1962), in Japanese (cf. McGloin 1976: 397-419), and in many other languages. =============== Now the syntactic frame will narrow down the class of possible fillers, so that "not worth ___" will differ from "not give (a) _____", which will differ from "not care (a) _____", which will differ from "not know ___ about", but it should be noted that it's not only or even primarily obscenities that occur here. In fact, the standard French negative markers "PAS", "RIEN", etc. originated in just this way ('I didn't walk a step', as in Eng. 'I didn't sleep a wink'). The class of squatitives you mention--(diddly) squat, shit, fuck-all, zip, zilch--are in some ways the modern English analogues of Fr. PAS. Incidentally, Dutch is even more creative than English in its invocation of negative polarity drecatives, allowing for colloquial sentences translating literally as 'Nobody understood a {scrotum/ball/hole/testicle/sodomite/devil} of it', as Gertjan Postma has discussed. I'm still not convinced about the "foutre" > "hoot(er)" move, though, especially since the alternation of the initial consonants is less plausible in English and French than in Japanese. larry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Aug 31 05:55:52 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 22:55:52 -0700 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: <39AC476B0001BF48@phobos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the process of transmission from French to English. Rudy From gcohen at UMR.EDU Thu Aug 31 02:55:47 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 20:55:47 -0600 Subject: Big Apple info from B. Popik Message-ID: In an Aug. 30 message Barry Popik wrote: > Gerald Cohen surely doesn't want all this. > From the MAIL AND EXPRESS (NY), 26 September 1885, pg. 5, col. 4: > [There then follows various information pertaining to the non-existence of "The Big Apple" as an early nickname of NYC.] ----Actually I am interested in all of Barry's new information about "The Big Apple." I believe that my monograph _Origin of New York City's Nickname "The Big Apple"_ (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1991) already presents the evidence that prior to 1927 "The Big Apple" was not used as a nickname for NYC. (The 1909 attestation, as already mentioned, is completely isolated and almost certainly means "overweaning big shot.") But additional negative evidence cannot hurt. The search for "The Big Apple" as a nickname for NYC around, say, 1910, is a search for the will o' the wisp, and Barry's additional negative evidence reinforces this conclusion. I will write a check of $100 to the first person who can provide me an attestation of "The Big Apple" as a nickname for NYC prior to 1920 (excluding Edward Martin's controversial 1909 quote). This is a serious offer, but I see my money as safe as if it were in the bank. ----Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 00:17:11 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 08:17:11 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:55 PM -0700 8/30/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] >is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: >hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the >acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to >interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could >have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the >process of transmission from French to English. > It is indeed phonetically plausible on general grounds, and if we were talking about a Spanish borrowing from French, rather than an English one, I would need little convincing. But can anyone cite a single example of a French loan with [f] being borrowed into English with [h]? larry From douglas at NB.NET Thu Aug 31 13:37:18 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 09:37:18 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:17 AM 8/31/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 10:55 PM -0700 8/30/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >>Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] >>is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: >>hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the >>acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to >>interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could >>have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the >>process of transmission from French to English. >It is indeed phonetically plausible on general grounds, and if we >were talking about a Spanish borrowing from French, rather than an >English one, I would need little convincing. But can anyone cite a >single example of a French loan with [f] being borrowed into English >with [h]? We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: 'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example (although "archaic"). The possibilities here include (1) English 'fouter' /futR/ > 'hooter' /hutR/ and (2) a re-borrowing in a non-literary (originally vocal) context (French 'foutre' > English 'hooter'), perhaps ca. 1800. In the second case the question is whether the French exclamation 'foutre' could be heard by an English speaker as ''hoot'/'hooter'. I think this is marginal, but more plausible if bilabial 'f' is employed. (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps prejudice one against the adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) Favoring this possibility is the coexistence of 'hoot' AND 'hooter' which I think are exactly the two expected realizations in English of French 'foutre', IF /f/ > /h/ is permitted. In the first case, the change might have been deliberate and euphemistic. It wouldn't be the most likely alteration IMHO, but there are reasons to reject some of the more likely alterations such as 'futter', 'footer'. In this case 'hooter' probably > 'hoot' at a later date. There is the possible analogy of 'phooey'/'hooey'. Another question would be whether 'houtre' or something like it might occur in French as a euphemism for 'foutre'. I'm going over to the library. Maybe I can find Larry Horn's book! -- Doug From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 14:01:36 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:01:36 EDT Subject: Rural Louisiana ? Message-ID: Here's a request for help - >> I was wondering if you have any sources or information on the rural Louisiana dialects. Not Cajun or Creole, but "regular" rural dialects. I am researching this for a film. Thank you. Sincerely, John Nelles << If you have suggestions, please notify him at jenelles at attcanada.ca as well as posting them to ADS-L. Thanks - Allan Metcalf From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 02:04:13 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:04:13 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000831084824.00a90d60@nb.net> Message-ID: At 9:37 AM -0400 8/31/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: >'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example >(although "archaic"). > Not only does it appear, but it appears in precisely the contexts we're discussing (inter alia). Here's the OED: ============= fouter fouter fu.t. Forms: 6-7 footra, footre, fowtre, 7 foutra, foutree, foutir, 9 fouter. [a. OFr. foutre:-L. futuere (the inf. used subst.). ] 1. In phrases, a foutre for, (to care) not a fouter. A. 1592 Greene James IV, v. ii, Jaques..faites bonne chere: foutre de ce monde! 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, v. iii. 103 A footra [Q. footre] for the World, and Worldlings base. 1622 Fletcher Sea Voy. v. i, Therefore footra, When I am full, let 'em hang me, I care not. 1638 Suckling Goblins iii. (1646) 26 Shall I so?-why then foutree for the Guise. 1871 R. Ellis Catullus xvii. 17 He leaves her alone to romp idly, cares not a fouter. 2. Applied contemptuously to persons. 1780-1808 J. Mayne Siller Gun iii. xxv, The astonish'd tailor..swearing he was better stuff Than sick a fouter. 1786 Harvest Rig in R. Chambers' Pop. Poems Scotl. (1862) 50 A sutor, Most manfully about does lay-A tough auld fouter. 1833 Marryat P. Simple (1863) 145 O'Brien declared that he was a liar, and a cowardly foutre. =============== although there's only one cite (the 1871 rendering of Catullus), the OED implies this was a standard use. Of course, the semantics are right--we've already discussed the parallel "not care a fuck" at some length. As noted, the real question is whether "hoot(er)" is an alternate form of "foutre" in this or any other context, and by extension whether there's any evidence that a French [f] ever turns into an English [h], much less any direct evidence that "hoot(er)" ever substitutes for "foutre" in other contexts, such as (2) above ("a tough old hooter") or the interjectional uses in (1) ("a hooter for the world"). > (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps >prejudice one against the > adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) I don't find this argument from homonymy avoidance too persuasive in this context, given the difference in the vowels and in the semantics, and given the independent evidence for the persistence of the obscene borrowing "foutre" (in its various spellings). larry From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Thu Aug 31 14:12:55 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:12:55 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Besides, "hoot" is well-known as an alternative for "poot" (fart) and not to give one of those is equally well-known. I'm for "hoot" = "fart" (while we are in the area of speculation). dInIs >At 9:37 AM -0400 8/31/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >> >>We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: >>'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example >>(although "archaic"). >> >Not only does it appear, but it appears in precisely the contexts >we're discussing (inter alia). Here's the OED: >============= >fouter > >fouter fu.t. Forms: 6-7 footra, footre, fowtre, 7 foutra, foutree, >foutir, 9 fouter. [a. OFr. foutre:-L. futuere (the inf. used subst.). >] > >1. In phrases, > >a foutre for, (to care) not a fouter. > > A. 1592 Greene James IV, v. ii, Jaques..faites bonne chere: >foutre de ce monde! > > 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, v. iii. 103 A footra [Q. footre] for >the World, and Worldlings base. > > 1622 Fletcher Sea Voy. v. i, Therefore footra, When I am full, >let 'em hang me, I care not. > > 1638 Suckling Goblins iii. (1646) 26 Shall I so?-why then >foutree for the Guise. > > 1871 R. Ellis Catullus xvii. 17 He leaves her alone to romp >idly, cares not a fouter. > >2. Applied contemptuously to persons. > > 1780-1808 J. Mayne Siller Gun iii. xxv, The astonish'd >tailor..swearing he was better stuff Than sick a fouter. > > 1786 Harvest Rig in R. Chambers' Pop. Poems Scotl. (1862) 50 A >sutor, Most manfully about does lay-A tough auld fouter. > > 1833 Marryat P. Simple (1863) 145 O'Brien declared that he was >a liar, and a cowardly foutre. >=============== >although there's only one cite (the 1871 rendering of Catullus), the >OED implies this was a standard use. Of course, the semantics are >right--we've already discussed the parallel "not care a fuck" at some >length. As noted, the real question is whether "hoot(er)" is an >alternate form of "foutre" in this or any other context, and by >extension whether there's any evidence that a French [f] ever turns >into an English [h], much less any direct evidence that "hoot(er)" >ever substitutes for "foutre" in other contexts, such as (2) above >("a tough old hooter") or the interjectional uses in (1) ("a hooter >for the world"). > >> (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps >>prejudice one against the >> adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) > >I don't find this argument from homonymy avoidance too persuasive in >this context, given the difference in the vowels and in the >semantics, and given the independent evidence for the persistence of >the obscene borrowing "foutre" (in its various spellings). > >larry Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 15:08:30 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:08:30 EDT Subject: New Economy; Sandalistas; Dog; Morning After Pill; Indonesian Food Message-ID: The latest DSNA NEWSLETTER (Spring 2000?) has a nice hot pic on page two of Henry Ludwig McKean Gerharz. But why only one (ahem) DSNA baby photo? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- NEW ECONOMY From the FINANCIAL TIMES, 30 August 2000, pg. 10, col. 4: City analysts have acknowledged this by creating a new industry category: "new economy" companies. Coined in New York, this expression signals to investors that they should treat dotcoms differently. "New Economy" was coined in New York? Not in Silicon Valley? Not by a book that used that title in the 1980s? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SANDALISTAS (REVOLUTIONARY TOURISTS) From the NEW YORK POST, 31 August 2000, editorial about Peru's treatment of Lori Berenson, pg. 30, col. 1: ...would-be American revolutionaries--they used to be called, derisively, "sandalistas"--... (Col. 2--ed.) It is to be hoped, though, that her experience will deter other would-be "revolutionary tourists" from following a similar path. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DOG From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, pg. 62, col. 2: Though one of the three undercovers who wound up confronting Dorismond called him a "dog" and began barking at him, (DA Robert--ed.) Morgenthau's letter dismissed these provocative acts as an attempt to turn "the situation into a joke," claiming that "dog" is "street slang for 'guy' or 'man.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MORNING AFTER PILL (EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION) I don't know what the OED has on this "M." From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, pg. 30, col. 2: On August 14, Planned Parenthood of New York City announced extended hours on Mondays at its Manhattan center on Bleeker Street to increase the availability of emergency contraception (EC), commonly known as "the morning after pill." (Not related to "The Morning After," the Academy Award-winning song from that great Shelly Winters movie classic, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE--ed.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- INDONESIAN FOOD From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, "Counter Culture" by Robert Sietsema, pg. 18, col. 1: _Ketchup Versus Ketjap_ ...Indonesian food remains rare in New York. (...) Sweet-corn fritters that reflect the Dutch colonization of the 13,000-island archipelago, perkedel ($4) are laced with onions and garlic and offered with ketjap, an ebony sweet-and-salty dipping sauce. Most of the appetizers are similarly fried, including lumpia (crisp vegetable spring rolls), martabak (OED?--ed.)(filo pies layered with ground meat and eggs), and risoles (supple crepes filled with carrot, cabbage, and chicken). But the tastiest of all is empek empek ($6), a Sumatran (Col. 2--ed.) curiosity assembling noodles, cucumbers, and egg-yolk-stuffed sago dumplings in a cold broth laced with vinegar and star anise. There's a real thrill to the gooey texture of the dumplings, and no soup is more refreshing on a sweltering day. Of course, the most famous Indonesian finger food is the satay. (...) Instead, order the spectacular rendang padang ($9), a dish from the Sumatran city of Padang featuring hunks of beef that cavort in a dark sauce teeming with the kinds of sweet spices--cloves, coriander, cinnamon, and mace--that made Columbus search in vain for the Spice Islands. (...) The most familiar is nasi goreng ($7.50), a miniature rijsttafel of fried rice, chicken satays, and a clean-tasting pickle of cucumber and carrot called acar. Another popular choice is bakso, Chinese soups of the sort that are adapted to local tastes throughout Southeast Asia. Mi pangsit ($5.50) is a tour de force of savory broth mobbed with egg noodles, fried wontons, and a delightful saute of ground chicken and mushrooms. (...) BOROBUDUR, 128 East 4th Street, 212-614-9079. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 15:38:16 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:38:16 EDT Subject: Juice Jacking Message-ID: The WALL STREET JOURNAL, 30 August 2000, pg. 1 (middle column) and pg. A16, col. 1, had a story on "The High Risks of Juice-Jacking." That is, people ("juice jackers") who steal "juice," or electrical power. When I typed "juice jacking" into Google.com, I got some porno sites. See www.doitnow.org/pages/178.html, which has a short "gangsta glossary" that includes the word "juice." From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Thu Aug 31 15:40:50 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:40:50 -0500 Subject: go = say, date? Message-ID: Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early 1930's? From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 31 15:52:44 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:52:44 -0400 Subject: go = say, date? In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000831104050.007e0260@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> from "Robert S. Wachal" at Aug 31, 2000 10:40:50 AM Message-ID: > Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early > 1930's? It depends on how you define "say". There are pre-1930s examples of _go_ in reference to animal noises, sound effects, or inarticulate human utterances, but I'm not aware of any pre-1930s (or even pre-1940s) example where it is used meaning strictly 'to say' in reference to actual speech. Jesse Sheidlower OED From RonButters at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 16:31:26 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:31:26 EDT Subject: go = say, date? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/31/2000 11:48:33 AM, robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU writes: << Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early 1930's? >> In the sense of "the cow goes 'moo' " yeah. Otherwise, I don't know of anything before the 1960s. RHHDAS has a remarklable citation from 1942--remarkable because those of us who have written in quotatitive go assumed that it arose in the 1960s and 1970s. From phille at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 31 16:53:40 2000 From: phille at NYTIMES.COM (Elizabeth Phillips) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:53:40 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- "The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more bottles of beer of whisky." Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin or history? Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Elizabeth Phillips Research Assistant "On Language" From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 31 17:01:24 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:01:24 +0100 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000831115413.0092d7c0@mailgate> Message-ID: I doubt that the history of 'package store' is terribly relevant to Lieberman's use of it--he just used it because he's from Connecticut. These days it's not so much a euphemism as a regional term. Lynne >Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which >Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... > >According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the >term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- >"The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many >districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later >cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores >liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises >consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where >alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") > >The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that >year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be >sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more >bottles of beer of whisky." > >Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin >or history? > >Thanks for your help. > >Sincerely, > >Elizabeth Phillips >Research Assistant >"On Language" -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:15:22 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:15:22 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Don't know about the origin, but there's been a good deal of discussion of this term (none yet on ADS-L) ever since Lieberman (sp?) said, last week, that his father's store was a "package store." Other written and oral sources have called it the store in question a "liquor store," so there has been some debate as to whether these terms are identical or distinct. Just in the last week, I've heard brief discussions of the two terms from friends as well as on TV and radio. I heard someone who lives in Connecticut claim that the term those in the know employ is "packy," as in "I'm going down t'the packy for some beer." Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 17:32:34 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:32:34 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). I am from the Midwest, but have lived in New England for about 18 years now. As far as I know, "package store" is the regular term in New England for what a Midwesterner would call a "liquor store", or a "state store" in those states where liquor is only sold by state-run outlets (was true in Ohio when I left, and in Pa.). I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. When I visited North Carolina I noticed that they have "ABCs" (so called), which are "state stores" run by the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. I expect other states show variation in usage for these stores, as Prohibition, when repealed, allowed states to set their own rules, and some were more conservative in regulating than others. Frank Abate From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 17:34:15 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:34:15 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: In New England, "packy" is the slang-shorthand for "package store". This is definitely regionally restricted. Frank Abate From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 18:01:14 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:01:14 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: > I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M > said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a > regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal term in Mississippi also. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:52:30 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:52:30 -0700 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times/"so" Message-ID: a long time ago (i've been occupied with other things for a while), mai kuha asked a question i was about to ask: So far, it seems to me that the new SO occurs only after an auxiliary. Any counter-evidence, anyone? a certain amount of gen-X informant work (easy to do if you have a lot of students around) and random collection of data suggest to me that the new SO has been extending itself from what i guess to be its original locale (see below), so that there are now a number of coexisting syntactic systems. my guess is that the new SO began as a reanalysis of the degree modifier SO - with things like 'i am SO tired of that' analyzed as having, not a predicative AdjP 'SO tired of that', with SO modifying 'tired', but rather a VP (or S) modifier, located between auxiliary BE and the predicative AdjP 'tired of that' (adverbs in -ly are sometimes ambiguous between the two scopes: 'i am truly tired' can be either 'truly, i am tired' or 'truly tired is what i am'). that should mean that the earliest examples ought to involve auxiliary BE in combination with a predicative AdjP. from there, there are several routes of extension: to other types of predicative complements with BE (in particular PP: 'i am SO in love with him'; i'm not sure about predicative NPs, as in 'she is SO (the) leader of the pack'); and to constructions with VP, rather than AdjP, complements, whether to BE - progressive BE ('i am SO trying to get over my disappointment') or passive BE ('the wall was SO eaten up by termites') - or to other auxiliaries, in particular perfective HAVE ('i have SO gotten over my disappointment') and modals ('i could SO use a cup of coffee'). all these [invented] examples have gen-X SO in between an auxiliary and its complement phrase. as a result, they are subject to (at least) two analyses: one in which the adverb is located after the first auxiliary, and one in which it's located at the beginning of the complement phrase to that auxiliary (but interpreted as modifying a phrase rather than a single word). this ambiguity is present for the adverb NOT, as in 'i will not do that' and 'i am not unhappy', which can be either an S modifier (outside the complement phrase) or a VP modifier (within the complement phrase). the first of these analyses allows SO to occur in examples where the complement phrase is not minimal; it can begin with another auxiliary ('i have SO been wanting to try sushi') or with an internal adverb, including NOT ('i am SO not tired', 'i am SO not in love with him'). this is another route of extension from the BE + AdjP examples. finally, most adverbs that can occur in the "aux1" position (after the first auxiliary, outside its complement phrase) can also occur preceding the maximal VP: ' i often am tired' alongside 'i am often tired'. (NOT is a famous exception to this generalization.) this fact provides the basis for still another extension for gen-X SO, to the position between the subject and its VP: 'i SO am not going to put up with this nonsense', 'i SO won't put up with this nonsense' etc. what i don't have any handle on is the details of the systems that individual speakers have; there are a lot of variables here. certainly, for each dimension i've mentioned, there are speakers who have made some of the extensions along that dimension. but there's a lot more to be said, beyond noting that examples like each of the following have been attested: 'i have SO finished that report", 'i am SO in love with him', 'i am SO not willing to do that', 'i SO am ready to hear the results'. (there's also plenty to say about the pragmatics, too.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From dumasb at UTK.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:58:02 2000 From: dumasb at UTK.EDU (Bethany K. Dumas) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:58:02 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <001401c01371$75704ca0$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: "Package store" was the only term I knew for a liquor store in se TX (40s, 50s, then I left). Bethany From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 06:11:21 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:11:21 +0800 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <001401c01371$75704ca0$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: At 1:32 PM -0400 8/31/00, Frank Abate wrote: >You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). This would take us through at least the mid-term election of the Gore-Lieberman administration, if any. The last DARE volume ends at O. > >I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M >said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a >regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. > Right, and if I'm not mistaken we had a discussion of "packy" or "packie" a couple of years ago, with Lynne one of the contributors. Ah, here it is (some of it, anyway); it was back in '96--so twentieth century. --Larry ================= Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 06:55:56 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: "M. Lynne Murphy" <104LYN at MUSE.ARTS.WITS.AC.ZA> Subject: Re: packy? To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L > Late that next afternoon, I found Det. Lt. Royce Whitlock of the state police > where he usually went for lunch on his days off: downstairs in the basement > of a thriving cement-block mini-mall in Lynnfield--convenience store selling > milk, cigarettes, potato chips, and lottery scratch cards and keno tickets > that kept a bunch of older guys in satin jackets rapt in front of a TV > screen; two-chair barber shop; sewing supplies store; packy; and a take-out > sandwich shop. > --George V. Higgins, Sandra Nichols Found Dead. New York: Henry Holt,1996 a packy, in most of massachusetts (that i know of), is a liquor store. more formally, a 'package store'. (this has something to do w/ liquor selling laws in massachusetts, but i don't know what.) don't know if it's spread to other parts of new england. _packy_ was definitely the most dominant term for liquor store in western mass when i lived there in the early-mid 80s. (i spent most of my time there in a umass dorm, so the packy was a frequent topic of conversation.) a "packy run" is a trip to the liquor store (to stock up). cheers, lynne ================= Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 08:41:37 EDT Reply-To: American Dialect Society Sender: American Dialect Society From: Larry Horn Organization: Yale University Subject: Re: packy? To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L To support Alice [Faber?]'s intuition, I can confirm that 'package store' is standard here but 'packy' inextant. Of course, it's hard to know that a form REALLY doesn't occur, but I've never encountered it in 15 years in the same South-Central Connecticut regional area as Alice's. I also don't remember 'packy' from a couple of years spent in Mass. in the '70's, but I do recall that 'package store' is somehow MORE standard there than here, although here it's used interchangeably with liquor store. People I know always opt for the latter unregional variant. Of course not all liquor stores are package stores: Warehouse Liquors, Liquor Land, etc.--the ones that are more like supermarkets --are not package stores (much less packies). Oh, if you were wondering, we don't call them 'lickies' either. Larry ============================================================Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 09:21:52 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: "M. Lynne Murphy" <104LYN at MUSE.ARTS.WITS.AC.ZA> Subject: Re: packy? well, either "packy" is a later development, or maybe it's college slang rather than general usage. i swear, when i lived there, nobody i knew used "package store" in normal conversations. maybe we were more affectionate toward the package store (and its contents and services) than average bay staters. lynne ================= Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 23:40:47 -0400 Reply-To: American Dialect Society Sender: American Dialect Society From: ALICE FABER Subject: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L A few weeks ago, there was some discussion on the list about the term "packy" for a liquor store. As per recollections by Lynn Murphy, this seems to be a Massachusetts term, especially Western Massachusetts (which starts, as far as I can tell, at Worcester, in other words, comprising the western 3/4 of the state, but that's another thread). Based on some other folks' unfamiliarity with the term, Lynn had speculated that this might be a more "college-y" term. At that time, I had volunteered to commission my sister to investigate among her colleagues. This evening I received her report (along with a request for other instances of regional variation in preposition usage along side "wait on line" vs "wait in line", to which I could only add "sick to/at/in one's stomach"). Her colleagues, from Enfield and Windsor, CT (essentially, just south of the Mass/CT border) can't imagine calling a liquor store anything other than a "packy"; my sister, as a non-drinker, had never encountered the term before I commissioned her. These colleagues are 20-something to 30-something, not all college educated... Alice Faber ================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 09:59:47 -0700 Sender: American Dialect Society From: David Goldstein-Shirley Subject: Re: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L Although I was subscribed to this list by someone else and have been trying unsuccessfully for some time to be unsubscribed (if the listowner is reading, would you please unsubscribe me?), I do have a response regarding the term "packy" for a liquor store. Is it possible that it refers to the ownership of many liquor stores by Pakistanis? I wouldn't be surprised if it is a British slang term. David Goldstein-Shirley University of California, Irvine ================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 14:10:39 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: Margaret Ronkin Subject: Re: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L I too thought of your interpretation, but I felt that it was unlikely in the context in which 'packy' was used on this list. Also, the British abbreviation of 'Pakistani' is 'paki' or 'pakki', which came into use in the skinhead era/late 60s. Tony Thorne's _Dictionary of Contemporary Slang_ (1990) gives three senses of this shortening: (1) "an offensive racial epithet"; (2) "a descriptive term for the many independent corner stores owned and run by (South Asian) immigrant families", and (3) (still awake?) "commercial or low-grade (South Asian) hashish... as opposed to premimium products from Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal, etc.". I think it's unlikely that 'paki'/'packy' in the second sense refers to "the ownership of many liquor stores by Pakistanis". Pakistani expats may be branching into the liquor business, but Pakistan is an Islamic republic (in which only "non-Muslims" and "foreigners" can legally obtain liquor) and, I think, many if not most expats would still try to uphold community values, at least in public. - Maggie Ronkin ======================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 22:21:00 EDT Sender: American Dialect Society From: Larry Horn Organization: Yale University Subject: Re: Packy revisited Especially unlikely in the context of the use under discussion, given the relative paucity of Pakistani-owned liquor stores in Western Massachusetts. As we seem to have determined from the earlier discussion of the range of these items, the distribution of "packy" is a subset of that of "package store", which extends through much of (southern and central?) New England. Thus there are proportionately far more "packies" along the Connecticut River valley and adjacent areas of Massachusetts than in New Haven or Boston, but as far as I know no such disparity can be observed in the distribution of Pakistanis. (Oh, and doo-wop music wasn't originated by Italians either.) Larry ======================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Thu Aug 31 17:54:33 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:54:33 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Responding to Frank Abate's observation that "package store" is a New Englandism: I grew up in Albany, NY, but I never heard this term until I went to grad school in Ann Arbor, MI. Maybe the word passed us by in the Hudson Valley. New York lets you buy beer and wine (except I think on Sunday mornings) in grocery stores/supermarkets, so the stores that carry the hard stuff require a special license and are called "liquor stores." You can also go to a "Beverage Center," where prices are cheap and volume is big, at least for beer and soda. Ann Arbor also had the "Beer Depot," which claimed to be the first drive-through beer store in the country (having no car, I almost always walked through). As I recall, a similar store in adjacent Ypsilanti made the same claim. Sort of like claiming to be the "(fruit or vegetable)-capital" of the world. There's often more than one! I never heard "packy" in Ann Arbor, so maybe that is restricted, as Frank says. Joe Pickett From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 18:10:56 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:10:56 EDT Subject: "package store" Message-ID: With regard to "package store," << You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). >> this is another reason why we all should give generously to fund the Dictionary of American Regional English, so they can hasten the publication of Volume 4, P-S. - Allan Metcalf From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Thu Aug 31 18:21:48 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 20:21:48 +0200 Subject: package store Message-ID: On jeudi 31 août 2000, Natalie Maynor wrote: >The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal >term in Mississippi also. And in Missouri, also, within my experience. -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 30 rue de Beaubourg 75003 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 18:14:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:14:09 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: At 01:01 PM 8/31/2000 -0500, you wrote: >Frank Abate wrote: > >> I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M >> said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a >> regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. > >The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal >term in Mississippi also. > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) > Exactly. Perhaps part of the problem is that once a term begins to be employed, even quite ephemerally, in political environments, it immediately becomes difficult for people to untangle actual usage from, on the other hand, assertions about usage that may be felt to conduce to or damage a favored political aim. When two different terms exist in the same area for the same thing (both "package store" and "liquor store" are quite famililar in NY and CT), users often tend to create a distinction between the terms even where none originally existed. I.e., users sometimes tend to assume that where two terms exist there *must* be some distinction -- which they then proceed to construct if it didn't in fact exist already. Just in the last week I have heard people from the northeast (including CT) argue that the two terms refer to two different things -- though I certainly don't know what the putative distinction would be. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 31 18:45:05 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or "state store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. Jessie Emerson From fabate at BLR.COM Thu Aug 31 18:45:45 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:45:45 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: I clearly didn't realize that this was as widely used as it seems to be. Maybe this thread will help in mapping the usage. I can say that, in my experience, its use is not universal. Could others comment as to whether it IS in use in their area? I have never heard "packy" outside of Mass. Do others outside New England know of its use elsewhere? Could someone at DARE check what is on file? The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. Frank Abate -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 31 18:57:59 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:57:59 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <011d01c0137b$94831e60$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: That's certainly the case in North Carolina. And not all towns have either one. When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was dry save for the town of Blowing Rock, which was a summer resort and/or home for many well-to-do folks from colder climes. The only ABC store in the county was in Blowing Rock, as were the only "fully stocked" package stores, as well as the county's only bars. That changed in 1986 when Boone voted in alcohol, which meant that package stores could sell beer and wine, as could grocery stores and supermarkets, as could restaurants so long as 51 percent of their revenue came from sales other than alcohol, and the local ABC store would be the only place in town where one could buy liquor. To buy a "liquor drink," as my friends and I only half-mockingly refer to them, one has to travel to a restaurant in Blowing Rock. It's a little complicated, but if you were raised Southern Baptist, or one of the various denominations of Bible Belt Christianity in the region, you understand it. You may not like it, but you understand it. I've never looked into it, but I assume that there are still plenty of dry townships throughout the state. > From: Jessie Emerson > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "package store" > > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or "state > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. > > Jessie Emerson From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 31 19:37:07 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:37:07 -0500 Subject: dry counties (was "package store") Message-ID: Dry counties certainly do still exist, and bootlegging is still a lucrative business in dry areas. My home county in Alabama, Winston County, recently was in the national news because of an election fraud scandal. The fraud included payoffs by bootleggers to officials. Jessie Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Haas" >When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was dry...[snip] From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 19:42:59 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 15:42:59 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: At 02:45 PM 8/31/2000 -0400, Frank Abate wrote: >I clearly didn't realize that this was as widely used as it seems to be. Maybe >this thread will help in mapping the usage. I was an undergrad in Ann Arbor (mentioned earlier on this thread) at the end of the 1970's; both terms (p.s./l.s.) were used there at that time, if I recall correctly. However, there were lots of non-locals in Ann Arbor -- but that's hardly unique in the U.S. at this late, highly mobile date, which is of course one of the factors we have to bear in mind in making statements about regional usage in the year 2000. >The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is >unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. > I didn't pay particularly close attention to the politicized p.s./l.s. debates, since they tended to run along predictably partisan lines. But the impression I took away is that some anti-Lieberman folks seemed to be taking the position that in saying "p.s." L. was deceptively employing a euphemism for something that some people apparently disapprove of, on moral and/or religious and/or economic grounds. Others argued that there was nothing wrong with either p.s.'es or l.s.'s, though there was some disagreement as to whether these were two different things or two different terms for the same thing. Please note that I am reporting all this sentiment, to the best of my rather general recollection, and not endorsing any of it. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 31 20:41:15 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:41:15 -0700 Subject: package store Message-ID: I've lived in Utah and Wyoming, both control states, and to boot I'm a non-drinker. But I have frequently heard the term "package store" and knew that Lieberman was referring to a liquor store. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 20:37:23 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:37:23 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: Frank A said: >The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is >unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. > to which Greg D replied: >> I didn't pay particularly close attention to the politicized p.s./l.s. debates, since they tended to run along predictably partisan lines. But the impression I took away is that some anti-Lieberman folks seemed to be taking the position that in saying "p.s." L. was deceptively employing a euphemism for something that some people apparently disapprove of, on moral and/or religious and/or economic grounds. Others argued that there was nothing wrong with either p.s.'es or l.s.'s, though there was some disagreement as to whether these were two different things or two different terms for the same thing. Please note that I am reporting all this sentiment, to the best of my rather general recollection, and not endorsing any of it. << My guess is that those who called L's use of "package store" into question, or suggested it is a euphemism, were unaware of this term as just a straight-up equivalent for "liquor store", at least in CT. btw, in CT the package stores sell all manner of alcoholic beverages. Other stores, like grocery stores, can sell only beer. And nobody can sell ANY booze in "packages" after 8:00 p.m., or on Sunday. You gotta buy early for those parties and Sunday events, unless you go to a bar or restaurant, where you can buy individual drinks only -- no carry-out. When I was in Ohio (18 years ago), you could buy beer and wine at grocery stores, but liquor was only available in bottles from a "state store". However, you could buy carry-out beer from a bar up until 2:00 a.m., closing time. I expect that the variations on this "where and when you can buy what" theme are virtually endless, given the 50 states, dry counties, etc. Ain't Puritanism grand. Frank Abate From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:18:20 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:18:20 -0400 Subject: package store In-Reply-To: <006d01c0138b$44e1bb40$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: At 04:37 PM 8/31/00 -0400, you wrote: >Frank Abate said: > >When I was in Ohio (18 years ago), you could buy beer and wine at grocery >stores, but liquor was only available in bottles from a "state store". >However, you could buy carry-out beer from a bar up until 2:00 a.m., closing >time. > >I expect that the variations on this "where and when you can buy what" theme >are virtually endless, given the 50 states, dry counties, etc. Ohio has now closed down all its "state stores" (earning revenue for the state) in favor of licensed liquor stores. I've heard "package store" but am not sure how widespread it is. In Minnesota "liquor store" is the usual term (as I recall from years ago). Closing time in Ohio is still 2 a.m., except when the time changes, when all hell breaks loose. . . . _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From douglas at NB.NET Thu Aug 31 21:36:21 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:36:21 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I did a little browsing at the library. I looked at Larry Horn's book but I didn't have time to read it completely. I consulted numerous reference books regarding 'fouter'/'hooter'/'hoot'. Nobody seems to see a connection between 'fouter' and 'hooter'. The consensus for 'hooter' is 'origin unknown'. 'Hoot' is regarded as a later form, possibly from 'hooter'. (I'd put that 'very probably' myself!) I didn't find any citations older than those from the OED. Two modern references (Partridge and Lighter) quote (without 'accepting') an 1859 source (Bartlett) to the effect that 'hooter' is a probable corruption of 'iota'. I guess one has to give some weight to this conjecture since it was presented closer to the origin of the word. 'Iota' fits well semantically, better than 'fouter' I think. Phonetically, I find it considerably less plausible than 'fouter', although perhaps not impossible. I suppose there could have been conflation too. 'Poot' = 'fart'' would be a plausible connection for 'hoot', but less so in the context of the earlier 'hooter', IMHO -- Doug From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:41:35 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:41:35 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Jessie Emerson wrote: > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. That is definitely not the case in Mississippi. A package store here is where you go to buy hard liquor or wine. > You go to a "liquor store" or "state > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. "State stores" and "ABC stores" don't exist in Mississippi. The term "liquor store" is sometimes used, though. In fact, it may be gradually taking over as a more common term than "package store." "Package store" was the only term I remember hearing back in the early days of legal liquor in Mississippi, but now I hear "liquor store" pretty often. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From krahnke at LAMAR.COLOSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:52:25 2000 From: krahnke at LAMAR.COLOSTATE.EDU (Karl J. Krahnke) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 15:52:25 -0600 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: A possible age dimension (that says nothing about its origin): I just asked my 35 student undergraduate class how many of them knew the term. To my surprise, *none* did. We are in Colorado, but the students represent quite a variety of backgrounds. They are almost all under 24 years old. Karl Krahnke Elizabeth Phillips wrote: > Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which > Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... > > According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the > term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- > "The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many > districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later > cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores > liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises > consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where > alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") > > The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that > year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be > sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more > bottles of beer of whisky." > > Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin > or history? > > Thanks for your help. > > Sincerely, > > Elizabeth Phillips > Research Assistant > "On Language" From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 22:09:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:09:50 EDT Subject: Package Store Journal Message-ID: The NYPL has PACKAGE STORE JOURNAL. Volume 1 is from 1939; the publication was based in New York City. The card reads: "New York's only liquor and wine publication devoted to licensed retail liquor stores." Sept. 1942, united with "Bar & Grill Journal" and "Official price list...; published as the Blue Book--a guide for liquor, wine and beer merchandising in the New York city market" to form Beverage media. (See that entry.) As you all may know, I recently read through BAR & GRILL JOURNAL. However, I did not have time to request PACKAGE STORE JOURNAL. That's at the library annex! I couldn't read it today, and I work tomorrow, and the library is closed Saturday and Sunday and Monday (all for the Monday Labor Day holiday)! I might get to it on Tuesday. In any case, the term was clearly used in New York City. From natalie at MAYNOR.NET Thu Aug 31 22:03:29 2000 From: natalie at MAYNOR.NET (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:03:29 -0500 Subject: Package Store Research Message-ID: I just looked in the yellow pages of the phone book that serves Starkville, Columbus, West Point, and Macon, Mississippi, and found that "package store" said "see liquor store." But notice the names of the stores listed under "liquor stores": A Package Store, Bulldog Package Store & Wine Collection, Cabana Package Store Inc., Caledonia Package Store, Corky's Package Store, 82 Package Store, Faye's Package Store, 15th Street Package Store, 45 Package Store, Frank's Package Store, Hill's Package Store, Johnson Package Store, Jones Liquor and Wine Gallery, The Jug Package Store, Mike's Liquor & Wine, Minnie's Package Store, Northside Package Store, Olde Tyme Wine & Liquor Inc, Sam's Package Store, The Shoppe, Snuffy's Liquor Barrell. -- -- Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 10:24:12 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:24:12 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er): the RHHDAS story In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Besides, "hoot" is well-known as an alternative for "poot" (fart) and not >to give one of those is equally well-known. I'm for "hoot" = "fart" (while >we are in the area of speculation). > >dInIs > Curiously, perhaps, the RHHDAS doesn't list this equivalence under HOOT. It traces our minimizer ('hoot' glossed as 'the least bit, a whit, a damn) to 'hooter', following the OED here, while pointing out the existence of 'a hoot in hell' (which doesn't seem to sustain the 'foutre' connection particularly well, although there's no doubt some alliterative reinforcement here). As for 'hooter', it officially is [orig.unkn.], but the RHHDAS does contain a reference to a Bartlett's of 1859 that takes it to be 'probably a corruption of IOTA', which is of course the alternate form of the minimizer JOT I brought up earlier. No mention of 'foutre' here. (Other HOOTERs, for noses, breasts, telephones, and joints, all fall under hooter-2, as does dInIs's well-known sense of HOOT above: the sixth sense (hey, good name for a movie) in the hooter-2 entry is 'a breaking of wind', with a relation to Australian slang HOOT 'to stink' and a citation from a willing and eager U. of Tennessee volunteer: 'Man, it stinks in here.' 'Did you pop off a hooter?' larry From rcpullman5 at HOTMAIL.COM Thu Aug 31 23:26:07 2000 From: rcpullman5 at HOTMAIL.COM (Rita Pullman) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 23:26:07 GMT Subject: "package store" Message-ID: When I was growing up outside Winston-Salem, NC in the 1960's, you could only buy liquor in W-S at the state-run ABC store. However, if you knew where to look, there were local "shot houses" where you could buy liquor by the drink - all us Southern Baptists knew where they were, but pretended they didn't exist, because we certainly knew no one who frequented those establishments. (Joke: What is the difference between Methodists and Baptists? Methodists will speak to you in the liquor store.) In NC, there are still several dry counties (McDowell and Yadkin come to mind). I live in Asheboro, pop. 20,000, the largest dry NC city - no alcohol sold at all, not even off-premises. However, we are in Randolph County, which allows each municipality to vote whether to have beer/wine sales. Asheboro has historically voted no in the alcohol referenda, but Randleman (5 miles away) has off-premises sales and a proliferation of "package stores" which sell only beer and wine. I don't believe liquor sales are permitted. Teenagers in Asheboro speak of having to "make a trip to R" in order to obtain libations for parties. I am sure Asheboro will eventually succumb to "progress," but I rather like its current reputation as a cultural backwater on the edge of more "progressive" cities such as Greensboro. R. Pullman >From: Bob Haas >Reply-To: American Dialect Society >To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU >Subject: Re: "package store" >Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:57:59 -0400 > >That's certainly the case in North Carolina. And not all towns have either >one. When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was >dry save for the town of Blowing Rock, which was a summer resort and/or >home >for many well-to-do folks from colder climes. The only ABC store in the >county was in Blowing Rock, as were the only "fully stocked" package >stores, >as well as the county's only bars. > >That changed in 1986 when Boone voted in alcohol, which meant that package >stores could sell beer and wine, as could grocery stores and supermarkets, >as could restaurants so long as 51 percent of their revenue came from sales >other than alcohol, and the local ABC store would be the only place in town >where one could buy liquor. To buy a "liquor drink," as my friends and I >only half-mockingly refer to them, one has to travel to a restaurant in >Blowing Rock. It's a little complicated, but if you were raised Southern >Baptist, or one of the various denominations of Bible Belt Christianity in >the region, you understand it. You may not like it, but you understand it. >I've never looked into it, but I assume that there are still plenty of dry >townships throughout the state. > > > From: Jessie Emerson > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: "package store" > > > > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South >carries > > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that >sells > > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or >"state > > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. > > > > Jessie Emerson _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. From stevek at SHORE.NET Thu Aug 31 23:27:10 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 19:27:10 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <39AED399.D1B31D20@lamar.colostate.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Karl J. Krahnke wrote: > I just asked my 35 student undergraduate class how many of them knew the term. > To my surprise, *none* did. We are in Colorado, but the students represent > quite a variety of backgrounds. They are almost all under 24 years old. Despite my being from Michigan, established here as a place where there are package stores, I never knew of the term 'til I started doing lexicography. They were always liquor stores to me. (I'm 33.) Usually in college though, people just talked about going to make a beer run rather than saying one was going to a liquor store or to the grocery store to get liquor. --- Steve K. From prez234 at JUNO.COM Sun Aug 6 02:00:48 2000 From: prez234 at JUNO.COM (Joseph McCollum) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:00:48 CDT Subject: Vancouver Canucks, New York Yankees, Washington Redskins Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999 20:46:03 PDT "D. Ezra Johnson" writes: >I shouldn't have sounded so skeptical about the "kanaka" story. I was >just hoping someone would contribute some of the evidence for such a >hypothesis. By the way, the dictionary didn't say it came into English through a >French form "canaque". Without that piece of information, I was having >trouble understanding just who in the Pacific Northwest was calling French fur >traders by the Hawaiian word for 'person', and why. If the word comes >through French, as Jim Rader implies, then it's more like the French >fur traders got friendly with the Pacific Islander fur traders, and picked >up the word as slang... > >But does anyone know if "Canaque" has (or ever had) currency in >Canadian French? > Back in elementary school (Pittsburgh area), we learned a folk song about "John Canuck." I want to say that he was a railway worker, but maybe he was a fur trader or something else. Does anyone know the song? Oh -- The History Channel does rerun its "Official Network of Every Millenium" snippets, so maybe they will rerun the "hot dog" one some day. I'll try to have my VCR ready. From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Tue Aug 1 05:57:58 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 00:57:58 -0500 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: The list has seen some discussion of this paragraph, originally in the Chicago Tribune: > 1989 _Chicago Tribune_ 19 July (Nexis) In their > confession to police, the > two youths said they would go "make a run" or "gank > an o.g.," which means > they would drive around until they spotted an > elderly woman, usually at a > bank or shopping center or near a school. Fred Shapiro commented: >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have >>earned him respect (props). Now Larry Horn contributes: > I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The > o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the > object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless > "elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. Citing Smitherman's _Black Talk_ assumes a fact that is not in evidence. The cited material does not specify the "race" of the two youths. FWIW, when I saw "gank an o.g." my immediate translation was "rip off an old girl" . . . "Old girl" would not be remarkable as a generic for an elderly woman in Chicago speech, "white" or "black" or European or African American. "O.g." is less common, but used often enough that it seems transparent to people who understand Chicagoese. Its use implies an attempt to conceal the identity of the referent from chance listeners (and, indeed, from the Old Girl herself). I tried to elicit some kind of reaction to "o.g." from my wife, without using "gank" to avoid one confusing factor. ("Gank" is not part of our normal use vocaublaries.) Her first response was "old geezer", since I hadn't specified gender. Both of us have spent most of our lives in Greater Chicagoland. If the youths actually were "black" Chicagoans, "o.g." might have had a more restricted, specialized meaning which I don't know. I am not well acquainted with the everyday speech of people who might be called "youths". (That goes with my retirement: I don't even see youths in the classroom nowadays.) I raise the possibility out of much better knowledge of the speech of older "black" Chicagoans, which is rich in terms denoting the "race" (and status and gender) of others. A European American woman of the "white" persuasion might be called a "grey lady", particularly if she were elderly. (Originally, that was a play on hospital volunteers called "Grey Ladies".) I have heard "grey lady" rendered as "g.l." at times; the abbreviation seems to have the same aim of concealment as what I have seen of the use of "o.g.". My use of quotation marks around the words "race" and "black" and "white" is deliberate and habitual with me. I do it to emphasize the extreme difficulties I have with the meaning of these fuzzy, slippery labels for perceived social groups. (All I know is that the terms are NOT based on actual biological differences.) -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:38 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:38 EDT Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel Message-ID: CREOLE COFFEE I e-mailed the Historic New Orleans Collection (www.hnoc.org) and asked about their holdings on Food & Drink. Do they have a menu collection--from Antoine's (which may have originated or popularized "Creole Coffee")? Do they have any rare bartending volumes to help on "Manhattan" and "Martini"? I was told I'd be responded by regular mail. From the BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL MAGAZINE, October 1907, pg. 136, col. 2: _Creole Coffee_ Into the blazer of a chafing dish put a lump of sugar for each person present at table, add a tablespoonful of whole cloves, three sticks of cinnamon broken in pieces, and one tablespoonful of candied orange peel (cut in shreds). Over these pour one-fourth a cup of brandy, light the brandy with a match and let it burn, stirring the ingredients occasionally. When the alcohol has burned out, turn in clear, hot breakfast coffee to fill the dish. Stir a few moments, (Pg. 137, col. 1--ed.) then with a silver ladle dip the coffee into cups. Serve with or without cream. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DANISH PASTRY OED has 1935 for "Danish Pastry"--and it cites Webster. Boy, and you thought OED was bad on "biscotti"! From John Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999): _Danish pastry._ (...) Although the pastries may have Danish origins, these flaky buns and rolls are more foten associated with New York Jewish delicatessens and bakeries. With this meaning the word first appeared in print in 1928. From AMERICAN COOKERY (I have the index only), Complete Index June/July 1921-May 1922: Pastry, Danish. Ill. ...516 From THE NATION'S CHEFS, December, 1929, pg. 46, col. 1: _Danish Pastry_ As Demonstrated By Christian Sorensen (Mr. Sorenson kindly posed for these photographs at his place of business, the Terminus Restaurant, Chicago. Photos by J. D. Vehling.) Christian Sorenson is a good baker. WHat's more, he originally comes from Copenhagen, Denmark, where he learned his trade. Putting two and two together, we reasoned that he must know something about (col. 2--ed.) Danish Pastry. We were correct. As we like to go to authentic sources for our information, we went to him to tell us all about Danish Pastry, taking the cameras along. The dough for Danish Pastry is similar in treatment to puff paste. You take a good stiff yeast dough, but take less butter than for puff paste, and roll it in only three times three. Let the dough repose some time between the intervals, then roll it out, as shown in the illustration. Otherwise the treatment is much the same as in the case of ordinary sweet rolls. The first "Danish pastry" citations seem to come after WWI. Some cookbooks: 1907--THE BOOK OF PRICELESS RECIPES by the Hahnemann Hospital (Philadelphia, PA) has "Cheese Pastry," "German Doughnuts," and "German Waffles," but no "Danish Pastry." An extensive "Pastry" heading has: Cheese Cake; Cocoanut Pie; Cream Pies; Custard Pie; Florida Lemon Pie; Lemon Cheese Cake; Hattie's Lemon Custard; Lemon Meringue; Lemon Meringue Pie; Lemon Pie; Linden Hall Seminary Taffy Pies; Maryland Lemon Pies; Superfine Mince Meat; Mince Meat; Mince Pie; Molasses Lemon Pie; Pumpkin Pie; Raisin Pie; Temperance Meat Pie. 1908--LOWNEY'S COOK BOOK by Maria Willett Howard has "Danish Pudding" and "Pastry," but no "Danish Pastry." 1915--THE SOMETHING-DIFFERENT DISH by Marion Harris Neal has everything from "Bubble and Squeak" to "Faggots," but no "Danish Pastry." 1916--MARY JANE'S COOK BOOK has only "Pastry, Turkish cream." 1918--CONSERVATION RECIPES by Mobilized Oranizations of Berkeley, CA, has no "Danish Pastry" in its extensive pastry list. 1918--DESSERTS AND SALADS by Gesine Lemcke has "Denmark Cake," but no "Danish Pastry." 1918(?)--COOK BOOK OF THE JUNIOR BOARD OF THE WOMAN'S HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION (Cleveland, Ohio; founded 1913) has "Zweiback Pastry" and "Sailor Duff" on pg. 111, but no "Danish Pastry." 1925--EVERYBODY'S COOK BOOK by Isabel Ely Lord has "English Pastry" and "French Pastry," but not "Danish Pastry." 1925--THE HOME MAKERS' COOKING SCHOOL COOK BOOK (Chicago, Ill.) by Jessie M. DeBoth has "Pastry: Almond, Plain Rich, Puff, Venison." 1926--CAKES FOR BAKERS (3rd ed., Bakers' Helper Company, Chicago, Ill.) by Paul Richards has "Danish Pastries, 200, 218, 388, 390" and "Danish Pastry Dough...201." It also has "Danish Cream Tarts...204, 391." 1926--EVERY WOMAN'S COOK BOOK by Mrs. Chas. F. Moritz has "Danish Pastries, 469" and "Danish Salad, 262." 1928--THE MODERN COOK BOOK by K. Camille Den Dooven has a large dessert section, but a "French Pastry" heading only. 1928--THE BLUE GINGHAM COOK BOOK by Imogene B. Woolcott has "Danish Apple Cake" and "Danish Sour Pickles." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- VIRGINIA REEL It's a reel mystery. The Virginia Reel was a dance. Was it also a food? From the BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL MAGAZINE, May 1906, pg. 504, col. 1: QUERY 1130.--Miss K. M. E. Clifton: "How are Virginia reels made and baked, and where are the best forms on which they are shaped baked?" _Virginia Reels_ We do not know the articles referred to under the name given above. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:46 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:46 EDT Subject: BSP (ASP, B2B, P2P...) Message-ID: Do these acronyms crop up every single day, without end? Just when you thought Y2K was gone... From the NEW YORK POST, 1 August 2000, pg. 44, col. 1: _Newest 'Net shakeout begins_ _ASPs are the latest online rage that crashes and burns_ By JOSEPH GALLIVAN (...) ASPs, or Application Service Providers, have been the hot new thing in the Internet space over the last three months. An ASP firm typically offers to take care remotely of a company's software needs, such as payroll or inventory. (...) Many companies that reveled in the dot-com moniker in '99 changed to a B2B (Business-to-Business) focus in early 1999, only to switch to calling themselves ASPs when a chill wind ran through the Nasdaq in April. With the flap over Napster, the term P2P (Peer-to-Peer)("P2P" sounds like this Popik's gotta go to me--ed.) has suddenly become hot. Napster users swap filed "peer-to-peer"--between each other directly--without much of a middleman, but nobody's figured out how to make money from P2P yet. (Col. 3--ed.) The supply of three-letter acronyms is not exhausted yet, however. Companies such as ClearCross of New York--which lets companies calculate shipping tariffs and legal bills associated with import-export activities and also lets them use its network of insurance companies, banks, and freight carriers--have found the ASP has bad associations. They've started calling themselves BSPs, Business Solution Providers. BSPs offer customers the chance to outsource pracitcally everything. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 08:40:28 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 04:40:28 EDT Subject: Mile High City Message-ID: "Denver has always been known as the Mile High City." --Denver Convention & Visitors Bureau web site (www.denver.org/maps/faq.asp) "Mile High City" is not in the OED, which is editing "M." From AMERICAN NICKNAMES, 2nd edition (1955) by George Earlie Shankle, pg. 122: _Denver, Colorado_ Denver is known as the _City of the Plains_, _Convention City_, and _Queen City of the Plains_. No "Mile High City"! THE AMERICAN THESAURUS OF SLANG (1942) by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin van den Bark, entry 46.1: City of the Plains, Convention City, Mile High City, Queen City of the Plains, _Denver, Colorado_ I e-mailed the Colorado Historical Society, with no response. The leading Denver historian appears to be Thomas J. Noel. I couldn't find his e-mail address, but the web's white pages did turn up Thomas J. Noel, 1245 Newport Street, Denver, CO 80220, (303) 355-0211. I haven't called him yet. The Making of America databases did NOT have "Mile High City," but you can recheck me on this. American Memory had: Copyright deposit; Mile High Photo Co.; November 18, 1907. OCLC WorldCat had: MOUNT LOWE: OVER A MILE HIGH: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AT A GLANCE (1904) by the Pacific Electric Railway Company, Los Angeles, CA. FORT DAVIS: ONE MILE HIGH (1911) by the Fort Davis (TX) Commercial Club. THE 105th MERIDIAN IN DENVER AND ITS MILE HIGH LEVEL (1911) by Herbert A. Howe, published by the Colorado Scientific Society, from its PROCEEDINGS, vol. 10. MILE HIGH HYGIENE by Elwood Waite Elder in COLORADO SCHOOL JOURNAL, June 1913. MILE HIGH CLUB (serial of the Mile High Club, description based on 1918). DENVER, THE MILE HIGH CITY (1922? 1989) by the Denver Chamber of Commerce. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 11:17:21 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:17:21 -0400 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. In-Reply-To: <398666E6.540B0DD7@corn.cso.niu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Mike Salovesh wrote: > Fred Shapiro commented: > > >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" > >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have > >>earned him respect (props). This wasn't me who said this. I assume "o.g." stands for "old" followed by some word beginning with a "g", like "girl" or "geezer." Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From fodde at UNICA.IT Tue Aug 1 11:33:03 2000 From: fodde at UNICA.IT (Luisanna Fodde) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:33:03 +0200 Subject: Conference Announcement Message-ID: CAAR (College for African American Research) 2001 Conference will be held in Sardinia Italy, 21-25 March 2001. The topic of the conference is "Crossroutes: the Meanings of Race for the 21st Century". Paper Proposals deadline: Sept. 15th. http://www.hum.ou.dk/projekter/CAAR/conferences/sardinia.htm From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 11:32:35 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:32:35 -0400 Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel In-Reply-To: <37.844aa0a.26b7e706@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > OED has 1935 for "Danish Pastry"--and it cites Webster. Boy, and you > thought OED was bad on "biscotti"! > From John Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999): > > _Danish pastry._ (...) Although the pastries may have Danish origins, these > flaky buns and rolls are more foten associated with New York Jewish > delicatessens and bakeries. With this meaning the word first appeared in > print in 1928. This is interesting. I had assumed Mariani takes his dates from the OED. Did he do his own primary research? Does he give exact citations, or just dates? And can anyone from Merriam-Webster give the earliest citation in their files, the basis for the listing in W2 in 1934 (not 1935)? Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Tue Aug 1 09:41:56 2000 From: jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Joanne M. Despres) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 09:41:56 +0000 Subject: Creole Coffee; Danish Pastry; Virginia Reel Message-ID: The evidence for our (1928) Collegiate date is a trial definition dated 12/21/28. It reads: Danish pastry. n. A rich pastry based on a yeast dough with the fat mixed as in puff paste. I see that a later citation taken from _America's Table_ (1950) by Joseph D. Vehling contains the statement, "In 1917-18 the newspapers and the menus of the nation were full of 'Danish Pastry', due to the activities of a picturesque, hitchiking patriotic baker from Copenhagen who . . . [text ends at this point]." I suppose that's a pretty good lead for somebody who has the time and inclination to read through newpapers of the era. Joanne M. Despres Associate Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St. Springfield, MA 01102 E-mail: jdespres at Merriam-Webster.com From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 14:59:40 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 10:59:40 EDT Subject: EITHER Message-ID: In a message dated 7/31/2000 2:04:01 PM, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM writes: << While I have no evidence to adduce here, I notice that the EI of EITHER is in the prominent word-initial, stressed position. In EIGHT and NEIGHBO(U)R the digraph is immediately followed by GH, which notoriously does strange things to pronunciations; CONCEIVE belongs to the well-known "except after C" subset; and WEIRD, if pronounced as German, would make an unGerman syllable (final /rd/ after a diphthong; does it exist at all?) But EITHER and NEITHER, allowing for the mapping of the fricative edh into the stop /d/, which is so well known that it is included in anybody's parody or representation of a German accent, form perfectly reasonable German (pseudo)words. Note also that they are function words, more common than any of these others except possibly EIGHT, and thus would be much more noticeable in the King's speech and subject to imitation by court toadies. >> This is a lovely caricature of a speculative psycholinguistic argument--thanks , Mark. I enjoyed it a lot. Now we just need to explain why a German reading English would be influenced by "the well-known 'except after C' subset"; why a German reading English would ignore WEIRD because the phonology is marginally non-German but not ignore NEITHER even though the phonology is non-German; why the supposed "strange things" that GH does to the way native speakers of English pronounce words would prevent a German from pronouncing NEIGHBOR or SLEIGH to rhyme with BAY; and why a king (or any other second-language learner) would be more influenced by spelling pronunciations for the MOST common word, i.e., the one that would most likely be learned aurally rather than through reading! From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 15:01:25 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 11:01:25 EDT Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: In a message dated 7/31/2000 3:22:34 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless "elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. larry >> I assumed that o.g. stood for 'old granny' From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 1 03:28:47 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 11:28:47 +0800 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:01 AM -0400 8/1/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >In a message dated 7/31/2000 3:22:34 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > ><< I'm not sure whether that's the sense of o.g. involved here. The >o.g. in the 1989 Trib cite is the gankEE, not the gankER, i.e. the >object of the verb "gank". Unless the presumably defenseless >"elderly woman" is the original gangster, but that seems unlikely. > >larry > >> > >I assumed that o.g. stood for 'old granny' for what it's worth, I couldn't decide between 'old girl', 'old granny', or neither of the above. Definitely not 'original gangster', though. Larry From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 16:19:18 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 12:19:18 EDT Subject: Mile High City Message-ID: Though it's not an early citation, Paul Dickson's _Labels for Locals_ has this reference: >>A common commercial adjective in this "Mile-High City" is _mile-High_. There are, according to one report, famous examples like Mile-High Stadium and "enough other Mile-High (or -Hi) shops, parks, schools and churches to fill four columns of the Denver telephone directory" (Washington Post, May 28, 1985).>> - Allan Metcalf From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Tue Aug 1 17:27:29 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:27:29 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: >>>>> My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. <<<<< Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 1 17:55:06 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:55:06 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > >>>>> > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > <<<<< > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) > From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 1 18:34:38 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:34:38 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: Livid is from Latin _lividus_, which means 'bluish; black and blue', as a bruise would be. FWIW, in Latin it had acquired an extended sense, 'envious'. OED (at livid, c.) defines it as "Furiously angry, as if pale with rage". I cannot see where the OED lexicographer who wrote this def got the "pale" idea from at all. The etymology does not suggest it, nor does the use of the term in its literal or extended senses, at least per the examples given in OED. The idea of "pale" in the OED def seems to me to be misleading. In expressions like "livid with rage; livid with fury", the image I have is that of a violently angry person, with eyes bulging and a deep reddish color in the face -- such a deep color that it suggests bluishness. I think that's a reach, but it's metaphor, after all, and color terms are known to be esp. prone to extension and looseness of signification. Frank Abate ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > >>>>> > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > <<<<< > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something like > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a further > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) > From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 18:59:40 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:59:40 EDT Subject: History of English (Not!) Message-ID: You never know what you can find on the Web. Here's the history of English as one person sees it. Disclaimer: So as not to confuse anyone, I will declare that this isn't the history I'd recommend. >>Most of the words in the English language were made up by the Benedictines and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words these linguists invented. The monks did the word construction mostly by writing a short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases they used wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. << http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/english.htm - Allan Metcalf From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 1 19:07:53 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 15:07:53 -0400 Subject: History of English (Not!) In-Reply-To: <67.7a500bb.26b8781c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 AAllan at AOL.COM wrote: [reporting on what was seen on the web] > >>Most of the words in the English language were made up by the Benedictines > and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words these > linguists invented. The monks did the word construction mostly by writing a > short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases they used > wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. << This came to my attention in 1993, where it was much discussed in the lounge at school. This person has spent much of his life working on this. At one point, he was even tying Greenlandic Eskimo into this. Without looking at the website, you cannot even believe how utterly in-depth this guy goes. It's truly boggling. And he's been doing it for years. From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 1 21:04:23 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 14:04:23 -0700 Subject: History of English (Not!) In-Reply-To: <67.7a500bb.26b8781c@aol.com> Message-ID: > >>> Most of the words in the English language were made up by the >>> Benedictines > and grammarians in their scriptoria, some later evolved from the words > these linguists invented. Wow--I didn't know that! So how come linguists today get so little respect? Nobody ever pays any attention to the words THEY invent. The monks did the word construction mostly by > writing a short sentence describing the subject in Basque. In some cases > they used wisecracks or jokes, even crude remarks and personal feelings. Why of course--like "basquing in the sun"! It seems so obvious once you think about it! :) (I hasten to add.) **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Tue Aug 1 22:56:23 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 18:56:23 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column [livid] Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: >I specifically remember looking up livid in two dictionaries in the late 40s--early 50s because a friend said it was grey-white. Both dictionaries at that time confirmed her definition. Bob > > In expressions like "livid with rage; livid with fury", the image I have is > that of a violently angry person, with eyes bulging and a deep reddish color > in the face -- such a deep color that it suggests bluishness. I think > that's a reach, but it's metaphor, after all, and color terms are known to > be esp. prone to extension and looseness of signification. > > Frank Abate > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > To: > Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:27 PM > Subject: Re: question for safire's column [livid] > > > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > > > >>>>> > > My unprofessional guess is that, as with many words, its similarity in > > sound to another word has caused it to accrue to itself a new meaning. > > While no doubt it once meant deathly pale, its similarity to /vivid/ > > allowed it to be misconstrued in the expression "livid with anger" as > > probably bright red. Now we have "livid sunsets" as a result. > > <<<<< > > > > Although this isn't proveable either way, I doubt that similarity to > > "vivid" had much to do with it. How often has anyone here actually seen a > > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face. > > > > IOW (in other words), I'm agreeing with sagehen about misconstrual in the > > expression "livid with anger" -- these days maybe more often something > like > > "He was *livid*!" (which may lead in future, or even already?, to a > further > > semantic shift referring to emotion rather than color) -- but expressing > > doubt about the relevance of the similarity to "vivid". > > > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > > (speaking for myself) > > From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 23:05:47 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 19:05:47 EDT Subject: Fwd: cocktail Message-ID: >From the Virginia Historical Society--Barry Popik -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Reference" Subject: cocktail Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 12:46:18 -0400 Size: 1638 URL: From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 1 23:29:01 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 19:29:01 EDT Subject: livid Message-ID: > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: ... How often has anyone here actually seen a > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face In my experience, the color that white-people turn when they are angry may be either deep white or red, depending on things like blood pressure and heredity. "White with rage" strikes me as being as experientially correct as "ruddy with rage." And then there is the idiom "blue in the face," which may have some connection to reality! I suspect that our perception of reality is in this case based an example of "the metaphors we live by" (Lakoff & Johnson's horrible old book is nonetheless a good shorthand for the point I am trying to make here). From editor at VERBATIMMAG.COM Tue Aug 1 23:11:25 2000 From: editor at VERBATIMMAG.COM (Erin McKean) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 18:11:25 -0500 Subject: parce que c'est le fete de Bastille In-Reply-To: <000701bfed60$74ed1100$b7ec43c0@pavilion> Message-ID: Some more old-newsitude . . . Thomas Paikeday's dictionary has "Man the barricades, citizen!" as an example sentence at "barricade." I don't think a dictionary for native speakers would put this in as it is (to me, at least) transparent. A learner's dictionary might, if "barricade" made the cut. Haven't checked that. . . And to commingle threads disgracefully, the only interpretation of "o.g." I had was "original gangsta." (I listen to much too much bad rap music.) Erin McKean editor at verbatimmag.com >Why won't a single dictionary editor admit this expression into his book? > >barricades; to (at, on) the >barricades; man (woman) the > >Have collected and submitted more than a dozen examples of this idiom from >respected periodicals, by well-regarded authors, over a period of the last >ten years, attesting to its general acceptance, but nobody wants to print >it. > >DEF = (to join) the revolution; to be a revolutionary; to prepare to do >battle for the Cause (any cause); to be where the new action is (as in 1789) > >Aux armes, citoyens! > >Bernie Kane >word-finder From storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM Wed Aug 2 00:49:16 2000 From: storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM (storkrn) Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 17:49:16 -0700 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: This is in wide circulation on the net with no attribution or other identifying data. Subject: VERY interesting > Life in the 1500s: > > Most people got married in June because they took > their yearly bath in May and were still smelling pretty good by > June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried > a bouquet of flowers to hide the b.o. > Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house > had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and > men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. > By then the water was so dirty you could actually loose someone in it. > Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water." > > Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood > underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the > pets ... dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs lived > in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the > animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, "It's > raining > cats and dogs." > > There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This > posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings > could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they found if they made > beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, it addressed that > problem. Hence those beautiful big 4 poster beds with canopies. > > The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, > hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors which would > get slippery in the winter when wet. So they spread thresh on the floor > to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding > more thresh until when you opened the door, it would all start > slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at the entry way, > hence a "thresh hold." > > They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that always hung over > the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They > mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. They would eat the > stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and > then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that > had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: peas porridge hot, > peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. > > Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel really special > when that happened. When company came over, they would > bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It was a sign of > wealth and that a man "could really bring home the bacon." They > would cut off a little to sharewith guests and would all sit around > and "chew the fat." > > Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid > content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food. This happened > most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating tomatoes ... for 400 > years. > > Most people didn't have pewter plates, but had trenchers- a piece of > wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Trencher were never washed > > and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After eating off wormy > trenchers, they would get "trench mouth." > > Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom > of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the > "upper crust." > > Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would > sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along > the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were > > laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would > gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. > Hence the custom of holding a "wake." > > England is old and small and they started running out of places to > bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their bones > to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these coffins, one out of > 25 > coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they > realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would > tie astring on their wrist and lead it through the coffin and up through > > the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the > graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence on the "graveyard > shift" they would know that someone was "saved by the bell" > or he was a "dead ringer." > From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Wed Aug 2 10:07:33 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 05:07:33 -0500 Subject: earlier specimen of gank and o.g. Message-ID: I made the mistake of saying: > > Fred Shapiro commented: > > > > >> According to Smitherman (_Black Talk_), an "o.g" > > >>is an original gangster, one whose bold actions have > > >>earned him respect (props). Fred Shapiro quite properly chided me, thusly: > This wasn't me who said this. I assume "o.g." stands for "old" followed > by some word beginning with a "g", like "girl" or "geezer." Ooops -- my bad. Sorry! I couldn't be more embarassed -- I've always insisted that when my students find it useful to quote, they had damned well better go back to the original source and get the words and the attribution straight! -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Wed Aug 2 14:29:02 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:29:02 -0400 Subject: livid Message-ID: Another term I've heard for "blind anger" is frosted, as in "That really frosts my ass." I've always interpreted this to been gone cold--white/bluish grey--with anger, which would be past the red stage. Any link, you think? RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > > A. Murie replied to Kathleen Miller's question thus: > > ... How often has anyone here actually seen a > > > person turn bluish-grey with rage? Usually the face turns red. I suspect > > > that most people encounter the word only in this context, and by inference > > > attach to it the typical color of an angry ("white") person's face > > In my experience, the color that white-people turn when they are angry may be > either deep white or red, depending on things like blood pressure and > heredity. "White with rage" strikes me as being as experientially correct as > "ruddy with rage." And then there is the idiom "blue in the face," which may > have some connection to reality! > > I suspect that our perception of reality is in this case based an example of > "the metaphors we live by" (Lakoff & Johnson's horrible old book is > nonetheless a good shorthand for the point I am trying to make here). From sagehen at SLIC.COM Wed Aug 2 14:36:30 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:36:30 -0400 Subject: Ron Butters' 8/1 "livid" post Message-ID: Like Fred Shapiro, I, too, was misquoted here, but these machines make it all too easy to get the fibers of these threads tangled. Ron makes a good point: that the expression of rage may be red, white or blue, depending on the individual's physiology. I didn't mean by my original suggestion that the reader unfamiliar with /livid/ would actually think it meant /vivid/, only that /vivid/ and, perhaps, /lively/ would lend it a sort of aura --a brightness-- that would stick in the mind. More LED-ness than LCD-ness, so to speak. A.Murie From jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM Wed Aug 2 14:30:40 2000 From: jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM (Lyons, Jennifer M) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 10:30:40 -0400 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse Message-ID: A (non-linguist) coworker of mine is curious about the origins of the phrase "flipping the bird". I couldn't find anything in my copy of the Random House HDAS, but I only looked quickly. Any answers? Also, recently, my mother and I had a little "argument" over how to pronounce the word "Morse", as in Morse Code. She said it was pronounced like "morris", while I say it rhymes with "horse". (Sorry, I don't know how to do the IPA in email....) This morning, the radio traffic reporter said "morris", too. Any observations on this? Thanks, Jen From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 2 03:32:25 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 11:32:25 +0800 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:30 AM -0400 8/2/00, Lyons, Jennifer M wrote: >...Also, recently, my mother and I had a little "argument" over how to >pronounce the word "Morse", as in Morse Code. She said it was pronounced >like "morris", while I say it rhymes with "horse". (Sorry, I don't know how >to do the IPA in email....) This morning, the radio traffic reporter said >"morris", too. Any observations on this? > For what it's worth, everyone here at Yale, Samuel F. B. Morse's alma mater, pronounces it to rhyme with "horse" (not with "Horace"). There are Morse fellows here and a Morse (residential) College, in honor of Samuel and of the funds bequeathed by Susan, an heir (daughter? granddaughter?) of his. I don't know how he pronounced it himself, though. Larry From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 16:06:51 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:06:51 -0400 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse In-Reply-To: from "Lyons, Jennifer M" at Aug 02, 2000 10:30:40 AM Message-ID: > > A (non-linguist) coworker of mine is curious about the origins of the phrase > "flipping the bird". I couldn't find anything in my copy of the Random > House HDAS, but I only looked quickly. Any answers? This term is covered in detail in HDAS s.v. _bird_ n. III.9. The sense referring to "the finger" and often (though by no means exclusively) used with _flip_ is subdefinition d, first cited in 1966. Jesse Sheidlower Oxford English Dictionary From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 2 16:17:44 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 09:17:44 -0700 Subject: Flipping the bird? and Morse Message-ID: re "Morse" pronounced the same as "Morris" (as jen lyons reports her mother doing)... jen, where did your mother grow up? i ask because one of the linguistic surprises of columbus, ohio, when i moved there in 1969, was this very pronunciation for Morse Road (a major east-west road on what was then the far north side of town). pretty much everyone who'd grown up in columbus had this pronunciation. just for this one item - not for "horse" or "force" or "course" etc. i'm not even sure that the "Morris" pronunciation extended to "Morse code". extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. so perhaps Morris-Morse originated with a family who (for whatever reasons) used this pronunciation themselves. others in the area would then connect the pronunciation (which they'd learn first) with the spelling; everybody knows that spelling, especially of names, is funny. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), whose names are spelled "just the way they sound" (that is, with default sound-spelling associations), not that that helps much From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Wed Aug 2 16:40:44 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 09:40:44 -0700 Subject: Campbell (was: Flipping the bird? and Morse) In-Reply-To: <200008021617.JAA28102@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: My mother, who was born in Houston and grew up there and in Olkahoma City, always pronounced "Campbell" as "camel," and once instructed me that this was how the name is pronounced. My reaction was the same as Arnold's. Peter Mc. --On Wed, Aug 2, 2000 9:17 AM -0700 Arnold Zwicky wrote: > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > always struck me as perverse. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Wed Aug 2 16:46:17 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:46:17 -0400 Subject: End of my era Message-ID: This is the ad I just placed in several our local newspapers and such. Part-time research assistant strong on grammar and usage for weekly column on language. Send resume and cover letter to Ann Wort at "On Language", 1627 "Eye" Street, NW, Suite 700. Washington, DC 20006 or fax to 202-862-0409. If any of you know of a recent college grad, grad student, or retiree in the area who would be interested in taking my place, please give them the above information. I will be staying on until the 25th of August so you will probably be hearing from me again, but just in case, thanks for all the help and advice over the past few years. I've learned a lot. In gratitude, Katy Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM Wed Aug 2 16:36:22 2000 From: jlyons at NETMARKETGROUP.COM (Lyons, Jennifer M) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:36:22 -0400 Subject: Morse Message-ID: Strange. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and so did my mom. I just moved to Columbus about a year ago, and I hadn't heard the "Morris" ponunciation until this morning (the WOSU traffic guy used it when talking about the road you mentioned). I'll have to poll my locally-raised coworkers. Why I never noticed that my mom pronounces it "Morris" and I don't, I'll never know. (I figured it out when she started calling that road "more-see" road and I tried to correct her pronunciation. She said, "Oh, so it's Morris Road". I replied, "No, Morse, like in Morse code" - and she said "That's Morris code!") Jen > -----Original Message----- > From: Arnold Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU] > i ask because one of the linguistic surprises of columbus, ohio, when > i moved there in 1969, was this very pronunciation for Morse Road (a > major east-west road on what was then the far north side of town). > pretty much everyone who'd grown up in columbus had this > pronunciation. just for this one item - not for "horse" or "force" or > "course" etc. i'm not even sure that the "Morris" pronunciation > extended to "Morse code". From sagehen at SLIC.COM Wed Aug 2 17:07:13 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 13:07:13 -0400 Subject: Campbell Message-ID: In eastern Nebraska in the 30's, Campbell was sounded more like /camel/ than /ramble/, and when the kids sang "The Campbells are Coming" you'd have been hard put to it to hear a B. On the other hand, up here in the northernmost part of northern NY, all the friends, neighbors & relatives of a local Campbell family say "camp bell": two distinct, equally-accented syllables with the P and B clearly sounded. I'm not sure if they pronounce the soup the same way. A.Murie From davemarc at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 19:02:21 2000 From: davemarc at PANIX.COM (davemarc) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:02:21 -0400 Subject: Campbell Message-ID: I imagine the "camel" pronunciation could lead to misunderstandings vis-a-vis Campbell's Soup--as in "I'd like some Campbell's Soup..." and "That's what Campbell's Soups are--Mm, mm, good." Q: What goes great with Campbell's Soup? A: Humplings. d. From jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM Wed Aug 2 16:10:03 2000 From: jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM (Joanne M. Despres) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:10:03 +0000 Subject: livid Message-ID: I'm not familiar with any further linguistic examples of the association between whiteness/coldness and anger, but it would be interesting to find out what (if anything) medieval and Renaissance psychophysiology would have to say about it. I've looked through the "pale" entries in a Chaucer concordance and found no connection between pallor and anger, though there's more than one mention of paleness in connection with illness, weakness, or fear. A similar search in a Shakespeare concordance indicates that the Bard most often associated whiteness of face with the same physical/emotional conditions Chaucer did, but also occasionally with envy or anger ("The moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air" Midsummer Night's Dream ii.1.104; "On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale, Killng their fruit with frowns" Henry V, i.2.203; "This pale and angry rose . . . Will I for ever and my faction wear" 1 Henry IV ii.1.107; "Your eyes do menace me: why look you pale? Who sent you?" Richard III, i.4.175). The OED offers this quotation: "Choleric men are of a pale or yellowish color." 1634 T. Johnson Parey's Chirurg. i. vi. 10. On the other hand, the following two quotations suggest an association of choler with hotness and redness: " In Aries, the colerik hoote signe." c1386 Chaucer Sqrs. T. 43; "The common opinion is, that all hot, and choleric Grounds, are red or brown." 1675 Evelyn Terra (1729) 7. These associations are admittedly pretty remote from contemporary ones, but who knows -- they might hint at a tradition of some sort. Joanne M. Despres Associate Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St. Springfield, MA 01102 E-mail: jdespres at Merriam-Webster.com From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 2 20:05:25 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:05:25 -0400 Subject: "El Olones" Message-ID: A friend has been researching his ancestry, which is part Cuban, and has traced it back to a man alleged to have been the bastard son of a pirate. The pirate was known only as "El Olones." Does anyone know what this means? The friend has been unable to find out. I apologize if this is an extremely basic question; it's not in my Spanish dictionary and I assume that the friend has done at least some work to find out. Thanks, Jesse Sheidlower OED From Allynherna at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 01:06:21 2000 From: Allynherna at AOL.COM (Allynherna at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 21:06:21 EDT Subject: "El Olones" Message-ID: Dear Jesse: I just looked in all my Spanish dictionaries, including the Diccionario de Cubanismos Mas Usuales and found nothing! Does the Olones have an accent mark over the "e"? If you mumble "El Olones", it almost sounds like "El holandes", which would translate as "the Dutchman". (Were there Dutch pirates?...) Anyway, this is probably WAY off, but it was interesting to do the search. Allyn Partin From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 02:07:48 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:07:48 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000731152333.0093c440@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Kathleen Miller wrote: > He has me looking into the word livid and how it went from pale-bluish to > enraged. The OED suggests "as if pale with rage." > > Merriam-Webster offers that livid can also mean reddish. I would more readily > associate anger with "reddish" than "pale". > > Which one is it - or is it something else entirely? The OED has this one right. Although "livid" has a number of different color meanings, the meaning of "pallid" is the one that gave rise to the sense of "enraged." Charles Darwin explained it in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: "The action of the heart is sometimes so much impeded by great rage, that the countenance becomes pallid or livid." Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 02:51:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:51:59 EDT Subject: Opera Creams (1938) Message-ID: From THE CANDY BOOK (Culinary Arts Press, P.O. Box 915, Reading, PA, 1938), compiled and edited by S. Claire Sondheim (Sondheim on Opera Creams! There's a place for us! Send in the clowns! So that's what Sweeney Todd served for dessert!--ed.), pg. 48, col. 1: _Opera Creams_ 3 cups sugar 1/2 cup cream 1/2 cup milk 1 tablespoon glucose 2 teaspoons vanilla extract Confectioners' sugar Place the sugar, cream, milk and glucose in a saucepan; bring slowly to boiling point, stirring constantly. Then cook, stirring constantly, to 240 degrees, or to the soft-ball stage. Let stand for 1 minute, then pour gently into a wet platter. When cool, heat with a wooden spoon until thick. Cover, let stand for about 1 hour, then add the vanilla extract. Knead until creamy, using confectioners' sugar to prevent sticking. Cover, let stand for about 3 hours, then roll out and cut into squares. Allow to harden on waxed paper for 24 hours. This is from the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, June 1907, pg. 80: Goelitz Confectionery Company, Cincinnati, Ohio (advertisement--ed.) Butter Sweet Opera Tip, Chocolate flavor Butter Sweet Assorted Opera Tip I have no idea if "Opera Tip" is the same as "Opera Cream." I haven't yet checked through 1,000 cookbooks I have here because I'm tired. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 02:52:07 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:52:07 EDT Subject: Peanut Butter; Tallahassee Hush Puppies; Pop Doodles Message-ID: PEANUT BUTTER (continued) As everyone surely knows, "peanut butter" was invented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 May 1899, pg. 33, col. 3: _HOW PEANUT BUTTER IS MADE._ A new factory has just been put into operation in Kokomo, Ind., for the manufacture of butter from peanuts. For a year or more, Lane Brothers, of that city, have been working on a process of making butter from the peanut to compete with the product of the farm cow, and have succeeded in producing the desired article. At the present price of the nuts the butter can be sold at 15 cents per pound. The process of manufacture is no secret. The nuts, after the hulls are removed, are carefully handpicked and faulty kernels removed. They are then roasted in a large rotary oven. Again they are gone over by hand for the removal of scorched grains. The nuts are then put through a mill and ground as fine as the finest flour, the natural oil in the grains giving it the appearance and consistency of putty as it leaves the mill, except that it is more of an orange color. By the addition of filtrated water, to reduce it to a more pliable state, the butter is complete; no other ingredient, not even salt, being used. It never grows rancid, and keeps in any climate. It is put up in one, two, five, ten, twenty-five and one hundred pound tin cans and sealed. The new butter is already in great demand at sanitariums and health resorts. It is used for all purposes ordinary butter is used, including shortening and frying. Physicians pronounce it more healthful than cow butter, and it is much less expensive. By the addition of more water a delicious cream is made, adn, if desired, it can in the same way be reduced to the consistency of milk. The new butter factory is located but a few rods from a large dairy barn and is running in opposition to it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- TALLAHASSEE HUSH PUPPIES (continued) Here's another Florida "hush puppy" hit--with "Tallahassee" attached to the name of the dish. From THE SOUTHERN COOK BOOK OF FINE OLD RECIPES (Culinary Arts Press, P.O. Box 915, Reading, PA, 1939), pg. 30, col. 1: _Tallahassee Hush Puppies_ Embodied in the title of this recipe is a most interesting story. Years ago (in some sections it is still the custom) the negroes of Tallahassee, Florida, that quaint southern capital, would congregate on warm fall evenings for cane grindings. Some of them would feed the sugar cane to a one-mule treadmill while others poured the juice into a large kettle where it was boiled to sugar. After their work was completed, they would gather around an open fire, over which was suspended an iron pot in which fish and corn pones were cooked in fat. The negroes were said to have a certain way of making these corn pones which were unusually delicious and appetizing. While the food was sizzling in the pot, the darkies would engage in rather weird conversations, spellbinding each other with "tall" stories of panther and bear hunts. On the outer edge of the circle of light reflected by the fire would sit their hounds, their ears pricked for strange sounds and their noses raised to catch a whiff of the savory odor of the frying fish and the pones. If the talking ceased for a moment, a low whine of hunger from the dogs would attract the attention of the men, and subconsciously a hand would reach for some of the corn pone which had been placed on a slab of bark to cool. The donor would break off a piece of the pone and toss it to a hungry dog, with the abstract murmur, "Hush, puppy!" The effect of this gesture on the hounds was always instantaneous and the negroes attributed the result to the remarkable flavor of what eventually became known as "The Tallahassee Hush Puppy." 2 cups corn meal 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups sweet milk 1/2 cup water 1 large onion, chopped fine Sift the dry ingredients together and add the milk and water. Stir in the chopped onion. Add more meal or milk as may be necessary to form a soft but workable dough. With the hands, mold pieces of the dough into pones (oblong cakes, about 5 inches long and 3 inches wide, and about 3/4 of an inch thick). Fry in deep hot fat or oil until well browned. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- POP DOODLES (continued) These appear to be "Snickerdoodles" under yet another name. From COOK BOOK (Issued by the Women of the WETHERSFIELD CONGREGATION CHURCH, 1930)(State?--ed.), pg. 55(?): _POP DOODLES_ 2 tsp. baking powder 1 tblsp. butter 2 cups flour 1 cup granulated sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 egg Bake in shallow tin, sprinkle a little granulated sugar and cinnamon on top just before baking. When served cut into squares. Mrs. Edward Deming From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 03:03:40 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:03:40 EDT Subject: Banana Split; Ice Cream Soda; Hot Soda; Rocky Road Message-ID: BANANA SPLIT (continued) OED has 1920 for "banana split." This is from CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "The Twenty-Five Best Selling Cold Soda Drinks," July 1907, pg. 102, col. 1: BANANA SPLITS Good fancy drinks make good leaders at the soda fountain and besides welling well are an advertisment for your whole soda business. Peel and split a banana, lay both halves together on the bottom of a large saucer. On the top of the banana put a cone-shaped measure of ice cream and over this pour a little crushed pineapple, a few powdered nuts, a spoonful of whipped cream. Top with a cherry. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ICE CREAM SODA The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, November 1906, pg. 94 advertisement, has "Fred Sanders of Detroit" endorsing a product. It states: "Mr. Sanders is well known as the 'Originator of Ice Cream Soda.'" Well known? I hadn't heard. The Cornell MOA database has HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (see "hot soda" in column two), August 1872, pg. 344, col. 1: Soda-water with cream sirups when well iced as above has been fanicfully named "ice-cream soda." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HOT SODA The term "hot soda" was used a lot in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, pg. 85, col. 1: _Hot Soda_ "Hot Soda" is not, as the name might seem to imply, hot soda water, but simply hot coffee, bouillon, lemonade, etc., served at the soda counter. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM (continued); CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM "I love Rocky Road." --Weird Al Yankovic Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK also has a 1938 citation, but from a different source. The date is handwritten on this pamphlet. From HOW TO MAKE RENNET-CUSTARDS AND ICE CREAM, "The 'Junket' Folks," Hansen's Laboratory, Inc., Little Falls, NY, 1938, pg. 24, col. 1: _ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM_ See directions on page 22 for ice cream. After beating the cream, milk, and Chocolate "Junket" Rennet Mix together, add 1/2 cup chopped nuts and 8 chopped marshmallows. Mix well and freeze. Much before Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream is this from column two: _CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM_ Warm 1/2 cup of the milk and dissolve 2 teaspoons of peanut butter in it. Cool and add to the rest of the milk. Proceed according to directions on page 22 for automatic refrigerator ice cream, using Chocolate "Junket" Rennet Mix. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 02:58:04 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:58:04 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000731152333.0093c440@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Kathleen Miller wrote: > He has me looking into the word livid and how it went from pale-bluish to > enraged. The OED suggests "as if pale with rage." > > Merriam-Webster offers that livid can also mean reddish. I would more readily > associate anger with "reddish" than "pale". > > Which one is it - or is it something else entirely? The OED's first use of _livid_ in the sense "furiously angry" is dated 1912. Here are some earlier examples I have found: 1841 James Fenimore Cooper _The Deerslayer_ II. 109 "Hetty, Hetty -- you know not what you say!" murmured Judith, almost livid with emotion. 1890 Andrew Lang _Red Fairy Book_ 205 When the King ... heard him again reclaiming his money, he became livid with rage. 1895 Stephen Crane _The Red Badge of Courage_ 99 The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. 1907 Francis H. Burnett _The Shuttle_ 48 He was in riding dress and was breathless and livid with anger. This usage probably is very old and not, at least in its origins, "colloquial" (the OED characterizes it as "colloquial" in its entry for the sense). The contexts of the many early uses I have examined make it clear that the color associated with the state of "livid" anger is a pale one. Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 3 03:09:47 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:09:47 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column Message-ID: Fred, what is the date of the Darwin cited? I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association between "livid" and paleness. Frank Abate From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Thu Aug 3 04:48:54 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:48:54 -0500 Subject: Dipstick Message-ID: This piece of humor came across my screen. Is this use of 'dipstick' common? Seems to me there's a similar word that I can't quite recall. DMLance > > Higher gasoline prices caused by the shortage of oil. The less oil > > we have, the higher the price at the pump. There are a lot of folks > > that can't understand how we ran out of oil here in the USA. Well, > > here's the answer: It's simple... nobody bothered to check the oil. > > We didn't know we were getting low! The reason for that is > > obviously geographical, all the oil is in Texas and Oklahoma, and > > all the dipsticks are in Washington, D.C.!!! From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Aug 3 05:32:06 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:32:06 -0700 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <200008030402.VAA25725@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: I wonder if the "camel" pronunciation is South Midland or SM-Southern? Except for one Nebraska source, all of the examples so far suggest this. Growing up in southmost Texas, we had a neighbor family I knew only as the "Camels". It was not until I was a grad student at the Univ. of Texas and had a professor by that name, whom I similarly referred to, that I learned there was a possible different pronunciation when a fellow student irately corrected me to insert the /b/. For years I assumed the Scottish air was referring to actual camels, never associating it with Campbells. Rudy From rkm at SLIP.NET Thu Aug 3 05:42:09 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:42:09 -0700 Subject: Campbell In-Reply-To: <00d701bffcb4$4022d280$2fc654a6@gmsc20b> Message-ID: And you offered no apology??!! >Q: What goes great with Campbell's Soup? >A: Humplings. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 08:44:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 04:44:51 EDT Subject: Sundae; Mexican Chocolate; Blinis; Apple a Day Message-ID: SUNDAE (continued) "Sundae" appeared in several confectionery magazines in the early 1900s. The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL (Philadelphia, PA) is "The oldest paper of its kind in the world, established 1874." The CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE was established in 1881. The CONFECTIONERS' REVIEW (Cincinnati, Ohio) is from about 1900, but the NYPL has just a few issues starting in 1907. The first two are well worth going through for "fudge," "brownie," "egg cream," "ice cream soda," "milk shake," "sundae," and others. Each issue had a recipes column and a column of soda fountain offerings. The NYPL holdings are from the 1890s and 1900s, but I might check the LOC's holdings later. I requested some 1918 volumes, and I'm sure that "Danish Pastry" is in at least one of these publications. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, April 1907, pg. 90, col. 1: _The Sundae_ There is no way in which ice cream is served that is any more popular than what is now almost universally known as the sundae, although in different sections is is variously called college ice, throwover, lollypop and even frappe. The sundae is not a new invention. This method of serving ice is older than the name, and, like many other good things, had its origin in France, where unflavored ice cream was served with a compote of fruit. The name "throwover" comes nearer to being descriptive than any of the other names, for the thing itself is nothing more or less than a portion of ice cream over which a small quantity of syrup or crushed fruit has been thrown or poured. This seems very simple, as, in fact, it is; but at the same time a great deal of taste may be displayed in the preparation of sundaes. They may be served in several ways. A popular way is to use a sundae cup; a champagne glass is also very effective. Champagne glasses may be procured in a variety of patterns, but a plain, thin crystal glass is best. Have a conical ice cream disher of a suitable size, say eight to the quart. Fill this rounded full; then when the cream is turned into the glass it will stand in a perpendicular position. Over this pour a small quantity of the desired syrup or crushed fruit, as the case may be. Place a small glace spoon in the glass and serve with a paper napkin. Serve a glass of plain soda or ice water with every sundae. (Col. 2--ed.) This makes a tempting and refreshing dish, and one that is especially enjoyed by the ladies and young people. Large dispensers, who do not care to use champagne glasses, owing to the amount of bother they cause and the loss by breakage, will find that a small neat sauce dish answers very well. Use the cone of cream in manner described. Such dishes are convenient, because a large number of them can be kept in a small place. The sundae, as a method of serving ice cream, is becoming more popular every year, and every one who serves ice cream should be in a position to serve sundaes to those who desire them. No great outlay is required, and as sundaes are sold in most places at 10 cents there is a good profit in them, and besides, they win many stanch friends. Those who have not tried serving sundaes will find in the proper serving of them a source of much profit and increased patronage. The chief requisites necessary to the serving of a good sundae are pure, high-grade syrups and crushed fruits and a good grade of ice cream.--_Ex._ A large listing of "Nut and Fruit Sundaes" in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, October 1907, pg. 100, does NOT include "hot fudge sundae." From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1908, pg. 91, col. 1: _Sundae, Sunday or Sondi?_ There are several spellings of the name of the confection of ice cream with a fruit syrup poured over it. The original way, apparently, was _sundae_, but where it came from is hard to say. The dictionary doesn't (pg. 91, col. 2--ed.) shed any light on the subject, because the word is not defined there at all. The name got to be bandied about, and on account of its resemblance in sound to the name of the first day in the week, it began to be spelled _Sunday_ for the cheaper grade confectioners. However, the voyager about the city has discovered still another spelling, which in the absence of constituted authority, is as right as any other. One confectioner, whose shop is pretentious, makes it a little bit odder by calling it _sondi_. From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, June 1908, pg. 66, col. 3: _The Origin of Sundaes_ Carl T. Pfund, confectioner of La Crosse, Wis., wrote to us on May 6th, giving us the origin of the now popular sundae. In his letter Mr. Pfund says: "Some years ago a young man stepped into a confectionery and called for an ice cream soda, strawberry flavor. As the clerk was about to pour the syrup into the glass he found there was but half an ounce left. Being Sunday, and alone in the store, he did not want to let his customer wait while he prepared some, so he simply placed a little ice cream on a dish and poured over this what syrup he had and added some strawberries on top to make or give it enough strawberry flavor. This dish seemed to make a hit with the customer, and whenever he called after that he would always (pg. 67, col. 1--ed.) ask for the same kind of dish he got last Sunday, and finally calling it his Sunday dish. From this sprang the present endless variety of sundaes. This I believe will explain the origin of the popular sundae of today." From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "Soda Menus" (NO "hot fudge sundae"--ed.), September 1908, pg. 83, col. 1: _SUNDAES_ Cherry; Chocolate; Coffee; Chipped Figs; Caramel Nuts; Club Sandwich; Coney Island; Cantaloupe; Chop Suey (?--ed.); Marshmallow; Delmonico; Maple Nut; Maple Fig; Peach; Pineapple; Raspberry; Sondi di Marron; Strawberry; Knickerbocker; Orange; Sunset. That's from a check of the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL of 1907 and 1908. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN CHOCOLATE (continued) Yet another citation is the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, December 1908, pg. 109, col. 1: MEXICAN CHOCOLATE The way they serve it in Mexico. One egg, one and one-half ounces of chocolate syrup, one teaspoonful of sweet cream, one-half teaspoonful of cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful of salt. Shake well; strain into a cup and add one cupful of hot water. Top with whipped cream and serve with wafers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BLINIS _blintz._ (...) The word is from the Yiddish _blintseh_, via the Russian _blinyets_, and first appeared in English print in 1903. John Mariani, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999). "Blinis of Caviar, Skobeleff" is on pg. 4 of the extensive menu of the St. Nicholas Hotel, Cincinnati, Ohio, Season 1892-93, in the NY Historical Society menu collection. "Blinis a la Czarina" is in the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, August 1907, pg. 85, col. 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- AN APPLE A DAY _An apple a day keeps the doctor away._ Eating fruit regularly keeps one healthy. First found as a Welsh folk proverb (1866): "Eat an apple on going to bed, And you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." First attested in the United States in 1913. The proverb is found in varying forms. --Gregory Titelman, RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF POPULAR PROVERBS AND SAYINGS (1996). From the CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, October 1907, pg. 83, col. 1: People who do not take much exercise should eat at least one or two apples every day, for, as an old proverb says, "Eating an apple every morning means saving a doctor's bill." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD (1939) The index cards of Barry Buchanan's unpublished ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD (1939) have been copied by Carnegie Mellon. It can be borrowed from me. I'm taking the first caller at Bapopik at aol.com... From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 3 09:34:21 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 02:34:21 -0700 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: Some of this sounds like information given by the tour guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I visited there last summer. --- storkrn wrote: > This is in wide circulation on the net with no > attribution or other > identifying data. > > Subject: VERY interesting > > > > Life in the 1500s: > > > > Most people got married in June because they took > > their yearly bath in May and were still smelling > pretty good by > > June. However, they were starting to smell, so > brides carried > > a bouquet of flowers to hide the b.o. > > Baths equaled a big tub filled with hot water. The > man of the house > > had the privilege of the nice clean water, then > all the other sons and > > men, then the women and finally the children. Last > of all the babies. > > By then the water was so dirty you could actually > loose someone in it. > > Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with > the bath water." > > > > Houses had thatched roofs. Thick straw, piled > high, with no wood > > underneath. It was the only place for animals to > get warm, so all the > > pets ... dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, > rats, bugs lived > > in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and > sometimes the > > animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence > the saying, "It's > > raining > > cats and dogs." > > > > There was nothing to stop things from falling into > the house. This > > posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and > other droppings > > could really mess up your nice clean bed. So, they > found if they made > > beds with big posts and hung a sheet over the top, > it addressed that > > problem. Hence those beautiful big 4 poster beds > with canopies. > > > > The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something > other than dirt, > > hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had > slate floors which would > > get slippery in the winter when wet. So they > spread thresh on the floor > > to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, > they kept adding > > more thresh until when you opened the door, it > would all start > > slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed at > the entry way, > > hence a "thresh hold." > > > > They cooked in the kitchen in a big kettle that > always hung over > > the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added > things to the pot. They > > mostly ate vegetables and didn't get much meat. > They would eat the > > stew for dinner leaving leftovers in the pot to > get cold overnight and > > then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew > had food in it that > > had been in there for a month. Hence the rhyme: > peas porridge hot, > > peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine > days old. > > > > Sometimes they could obtain pork and would feel > really special > > when that happened. When company came over, they > would > > bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. > It was a sign of > > wealth and that a man "could really bring home the > bacon." They > > would cut off a little to sharewith guests and > would all sit around > > and "chew the fat." > > > > Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food > with a high acid > > content caused some of the lead to leach onto the > food. This happened > > most often with tomatoes, so they stopped eating > tomatoes ... for 400 > > years. > > > > Most people didn't have pewter plates, but had > trenchers- a piece of > > wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. > Trencher were never washed > > > > and a lot of times worms got into the wood. After > eating off wormy > > trenchers, they would get "trench mouth." > > > > Bread was divided according to status. Workers got > the burnt bottom > > of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests > got the top, or the > > "upper crust." > > > > Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The > combination would > > sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. > Someone walking along > > the road would take them for dead and prepare them > for burial. They were > > > > laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days > and the family would > > gather around and eat and drink and wait and see > if they would wake up. > > Hence the custom of holding a "wake." > > > > England is old and small and they started running > out of places to > > bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and > would take their bones > > to a house and reuse the grave. In reopening these > coffins, one out of > > 25 > > coffins were found to have scratch marks on the > inside and they > > realized they had been burying people alive. So > they thought they would > > tie astring on their wrist and lead it through the > coffin and up through > > > > the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would > have to sit out in the > > graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Hence > on the "graveyard > > shift" they would know that someone was "saved by > the bell" > > or he was a "dead ringer." > > ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 11:12:19 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:12:19 -0400 Subject: Dipstick In-Reply-To: <3988F9B1.6D5DC4E@missouri.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Donald M. Lance wrote: > This piece of humor came across my screen. Is this use of 'dipstick' > common? Seems to me there's a similar word that I can't quite recall. RHHDAS has an entry for "dipstick," describing it as "partly euphemistic" for "dipshit." Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 11:44:29 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:44:29 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > Fred, what is the date of the Darwin cited? I am taking the quote from the 1898 edition, but it was first published in 1872. > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. Well, it looks like the OED entry misses a major part of the history of "livid" (it refers to paleness in sense c but omits the history that gave rise to sense c). The Merriam-Webster entry is better, picking up as it does the paleness sense which research into early uses of the word reveals to be a common one. I'll try to post some of my evidence later today. Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 00:21:46 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:21:46 +0800 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: At 11:09 PM -0400 8/2/00, Frank Abate wrote: >I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification >of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I >would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association >between "livid" and paleness. > Note that "lividity", as used by doctors (or at least by people who play doctors on television), refers to 'the quality or condition of being livid; a pale-bluish discoloration' as on a bruise, and never to redness. This goes back to a 1477 cite in the OED: This Waun Colour called Lividitie, In Envious Men useth much to be where 'waun' or wan certainly brings out the character of the color larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 00:38:39 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:38:39 +0800 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting In-Reply-To: <20000803093421.27998.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: At 2:34 AM -0700 8/3/00, Margaret Lee wrote: >Some of this sounds like information given by the tour >guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I >visited there last summer. > > >--- storkrn wrote: >> This is in wide circulation on the net with no >> attribution or other >> identifying data. >> >> Subject: VERY interesting >> >> > > > Life in the 1500s: We did discuss (and for the most part explode) these various stories a few months ago when the same post was circulated on ads-l; the discussion should be searchable via the archives. Larry From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 3 13:15:46 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:15:46 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: Rudy wrote: > I wonder if the "camel" pronunciation is South Midland or SM-Southern? I think I'm a datum supporting its being Southern. The reason I say "I think" is that I'm pretty sure I have at least a tiny hint of the [b] in it most of the time now. I'm not sure that I always have, though. Nor did the people around me in childhood since I remember thinking that a neighbor up the street had an odd first name -- his name to my ears was "Camel McCool." I thought being named Camel was weird. Later I learned that it was spelled Campbell. I just did a test on my elderly mother, whom I'm visiting at the moment, but my wise methodology didn't work. I asked her whether she remembered the McCools in our old Jackson neighborhood. She did. I then asked if she remembered the first name of their son. She didn't. Then I asked her if she remembered the last name of my elementary-school friend named Cay. She didn't. (Her memory is off and on these days.) So finally I wrote Campbell and asked her how she pronounced it. There was a [b]. She agreed that she might be pronouncing it more self-consciously when looking at it, though. When I told her why I was asking, her thought about it was the same as mine -- that she thinks she has a little bit of a [b] in it but not very much. She was born January 1914 in Huntsville, AL, but lived most of her life in Mississippi. I was born March 1943 in Jackson, MS, and have spent almost all of my life in Mississippi. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 3 14:03:06 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 09:03:06 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: Another couple of bits of data on the South Midland/Southern theory: 1. There is a town in North Alabama called "Phil Campbell." For natives of PC, while the /b/ is not as evident as the TV pronunciation of "Campbell's Soup," there is still a stop in the middle of "Campbell." I don't think that it can be simplified into /kaeml/ or /kaem at l/. 2. Sometimes in the South (and maybe elsewhere, as well), some religious groups that believe in predestination are called /kaem at laIts/--it's even spelled "Camelites" sometimes. It comes from "Campbellites," the names of followers of a particular Scottish religious leader (I think--religious history is not my forte). Jessie Emerson From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 14:06:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:06:51 -0400 Subject: question for safire's column In-Reply-To: <3988E27B.3561F793@earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. All right, here are some examples showing the association of "livid" with paleness. I have not been precise about editions and page numbers, because my purpose here is not to trace a first use but rather to illustrate a common association: 1851 Herman Melville _Moby-Dick_ Threading its way out from among his grey hairs ... you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. 1880 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu _The Purcell Papers_ This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. _Id._ Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid. 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson _Treasure Island_ The sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle _The White Compnay_ His swarthy features blanched to a livid gray. 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle _The Adventure of the Yellow Face_ Its colour was what had impressed me most. It was of a livid chalky white. 1897 Bram Stoker _Dracula_ The last unconscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. 1904 Joseph Conrad _Nostromo_ Sotillo's ebony moustache contrasted violently with the livid colouring of his cheeks. 1906 Joseph Conrad _A Set of Six_ Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains, shining with the livid light of snows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 03:06:32 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 11:06:32 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <00a101bffd53$8c95be80$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: At 9:03 AM -0500 8/3/00, Jessie Emerson wrote: >Another couple of bits of data on the South Midland/Southern theory: > >... > >2. Sometimes in the South (and maybe elsewhere, as well), some religious >groups that believe in predestination are called /kaem at laIts/--it's even >spelled "Camelites" sometimes. It comes from "Campbellites," the names of >followers of a particular Scottish religious leader (I think--religious >history is not my forte). > And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. larry From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 14:57:54 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:57:54 -0400 Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? Message-ID: Looking at a lot of evidence that I have at my disposal, including the OED but going far beyond it, and seeing how many colors have been prefixed by the word "livid," and looking at how the adverb "lividly" is used, an answer is beginning to occur to me. Is it possible that "livid" has been used for centuries as an intensifier, that a livid red is an intense red, a livid gray is a very pale gray, etc.? How else to explain a word whose etymological roots relate to blue, but which has been strongly associated with anger, with fear, and with death? At the least, it is clear to me that the history of "livid" is a very complex one, and when I search historical texts for the word I feel I am glimpsing its complexity in a way that no previous lexicographer has done. The OED may have had sufficient evidence to glimpse that complexity, but appears to have failed to put that evidence together in a coherent fashion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Aug 3 15:00:04 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 08:00:04 -0700 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: rudy troike's message suggests this really wonderful image of the bagpipes skirling "the camels are coming", while lines of dour dromedaries plod through the heather. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 3 15:54:11 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:54:11 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: It's funny, because the first time I heard someone say Camelites, I asked "The nuns?" (the North Alabama pronunciation of Carmelites being something like, although not exactly, /k at rm@laIts/). Jessie Emerson > And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. > > larry From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 3 15:58:20 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 11:58:20 -0400 Subject: Safire's guest column In-Reply-To: Message-ID: August 6th's guest column is by Fred Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 3 16:03:44 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 12:03:44 -0400 Subject: Cam(pb)ell Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky writes: >>>>> extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. <<<<< PING! Ah HA! This resolves a puzzle that has haunted me ... well, bubbled around in the unconscious and occasionally surfaced, leaving me wondering "Why DID they do that?" as well as "Why am I thinking of THAT?" -- since [pause to reckon] the summer of 1965. I was in Corbin, Kentucky, and near where I was staying there was a motel with a sign "Campbell's Motel"* with a picture of a camel. It didn't take me long to realize it was supposed to be a pun on the name, but it always seemed awfully far-fetched to me. Now I get it. * Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL -- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the picture were there. Thanks, Arnold. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 3 16:29:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 12:29:09 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At 12:03 PM 8/3/2000 -0400, you wrote: >* Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL >-- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the >picture were there. > > Mark A. Mandel > Interesting discussion of Cam(pb)ell's. But the above reminds me of a question I've had in mind for awhile, and this is as good a time as any to ask it: What's the commonest term for "greengrocer's apostrophe" here in the US ("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in reference to the US)? Or have language scholars in the US simply adopted what would seem to be a UK-coined and UK-oriented term? Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 3 18:12:05 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:12:05 -0500 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the produce manager the price of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those muskmelons or the cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I asked her what the difference was between the. She said that she thought they were the same but that the produce department made a distinction between the smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, Indiana-grown melon that has natural seams. The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific Armenian variety of Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at Cantelupo, near Rome. Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several different varieties. As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was taught, I'm not sure which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name for what was colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE Michigan also called them all "mushmelon". What distinctions do you find between the two terms among people who are not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? Herb Stahlke From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 3 06:12:50 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 14:12:50 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels In-Reply-To: <014d01bffd63$10bbdc80$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: At 10:54 AM -0500 8/3/00, Jessie Emerson wrote: >It's funny, because the first time I heard someone say Camelites, I asked >"The nuns?" (the North Alabama pronunciation of Carmelites being something >like, although not exactly, /k at rm@laIts/). > >Jessie Emerson > >> And if those Southerners were visiting Boston, any reference to those >religious groups would be interpreted as a discussion of the order of >sisters devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i.e. the Carmelites, no >relation to the Scottish Presbyterians Thomas and Alexander Campbell. >> > > larry The one possible sticking point here (between at least the Boston (or *a* Boston) pronunciation of "Carmelite" and the relevant Southern pronunciation of "Campbellite", both putatively merging to "Camelite", is the [ae] vowel, which I would guess is a bit longer in the former case. But in a context of discussing religious groups, I'd imagine such a distinction might be ignored. Larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 3 23:32:22 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 19:32:22 EDT Subject: Quiche; Falafel; Sundae Message-ID: QUICHE (continued) From COOK'S TOUR OF EUROPEAN KITCHENS: THE BEST CONTINENTAL DISHES SUITED TO AN ENGLISH TABLE (Chatto & Windus, London, 1933) by K. and M. von Schumacher, "France, The Gourmet's Paradise," pg. 26: QUICHE 25. Mix together 1 lb. of flour, 6 oz. of butter, 2 eggs, salt, and enough water (about a glass) to obtain a smooth paste. Work it well. Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Spread on your tart tin and raise the edge about 1 inch all round. Fry 2 or 3 fine rashers of fat bacon lightly in butter and cut them into small pieces. Put them on your paste. Beat up 3 eggs and mix them with a cupful of grated Parmesan cheese and enough cream to fill the tart to the edge. Place small pieces of butter here and there and bake 30 to 40 minutes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- FALAFEL (?)(continued) From BANQUETS OF THE NATIONS: EIGHTY-SIX DINNERS CHARACTERISTIC AND TYPICAL EACH OF ITS OWN COUNTRY (J & J Gray & Co., Edinburgh, 1911) by Robert H. Christie, "Palestine (Hebrew)," pg. 483: SALATA HUS WA FLAFIL (Lettuce and Pepper Salad.) Incorporate a lettuce torn into small pieces with a couple of thinly sliced chillies or peppers. Make a dressing of oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SUNDAE (continued) From the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 August 1900, pg. 28, col. 1: _NEW SODA WATER DRINKS._ (...) "What's a Sunday?" asked the reporter, searching for light on feminine taste. "A Sunday? Well, that's something that started in Chicago; but every town has a different name for it. It's only ice cream with fruit syrup poured over it, but it has more names than a Spanish baby. The girls call it Sunday and White Wings and Hobson and Sunshine and Dewey. Now, whenever anyone comes in and asks for something we never heard of, we serve a Sunday, and nine times out of ten it's a good thing." (...)--_The Sun, New York_. From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Fri Aug 4 04:24:23 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 23:24:23 -0500 Subject: Cam(pb)ell Message-ID: Back in 1958 when ZIP Codes first came in, I was living in a town of about 3000 in West Texas (McCamey). A friend of mine was named Richmond Campbell, and most of his friends called him Rich. An acquaintance in Midland (where W is from, kind of) sent him a note and on the envelope drew a money bag and a camel and wrote 79752. A day or so later, the missive was placed in Richmond's PO box. I think I usually, maybe always, say the -b- in Campbell, and maybe always have, but I can't think of the religious groups as anything other than "Camelites" because that's the way Texas members of the group would say the name, though I'd probably say a slight -b- unless I were consciously imitating the "Camelites." DMLance Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Arnold Zwicky writes: > > >>>>> > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends > married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception > for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. > <<<<< > > PING! Ah HA! > > This resolves a puzzle that has haunted me ... well, bubbled around in the > unconscious and occasionally surfaced, leaving me wondering "Why DID they > do that?" as well as "Why am I thinking of THAT?" -- since [pause to > reckon] the summer of 1965. I was in Corbin, Kentucky, and near where I was > staying there was a motel with a sign "Campbell's Motel"* with a picture of > a camel. It didn't take me long to realize it was supposed to be a pun on > the name, but it always seemed awfully far-fetched to me. Now I get it. > > * Academic honesty: maybe the wording was something different, like "MOTEL > -- The Campbell's" [with greengrocer's apostrophe], but the name and the > picture were there. > > Thanks, Arnold. > > -- Mark > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com > (speaking for myself) From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 4 04:37:56 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 21:37:56 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008031629.MAA29870@is2.nyu.edu> Message-ID: Ok, I've never heard it. What is it? Rima From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 04:42:50 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 21:42:50 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: rima mckinzey asks: Ok, I've never heard it. What is it? apostrophe's used for the plural. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 05:15:30 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 01:15:30 EDT Subject: Philadelphia Buns Message-ID: "I promise a Philadelphia bun in every pot." --George W. Bush (paraphrased) (Bush separates the Republicans from the Democrats, who, of course, are jelly doughnuts--ed.) I previously posted "sticky buns." "Philadelphia" was not (or rarely) in the name in the 19th century. Herman Hueg's ILLUSTRATED CAKE BAKER (1892) has "104. Claremont Buns," "105. Corrington Buns," and "238. Bath Buns." Jessup Whitehead's COOKING FOR PROFIT (1893) has "Buns: currant, cinnamon, Chelsea." From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 September 1901, pg. 18, col. 2: _Adelphia Bun._ 2 lbs. flour. 1/2 lb. butter or lard. 3/4 lb. powdered sugar. 2 eggs. 1/2 pint milk (more or less). 3/4 oz. good baking powder. 1/2 lb. currants. 1/4 lb. finely-chopped mixed peels. Any flavor you choose. To mix, sift baking-powder in the flour, cream butter, sugar and eggs, add milk and ammonia, stir in, then add flour and half mix, then add the currants and peel, finish mixing, adding flour or milk, if needed, to form a medium slack mass. When mixed drop them--in size to sell at what price you choose--with a spoon or with your hand, unto greased pans, wash them with egg and milk wash, bake them plain or dust with sugar, as you choose. From AMERICAN COOKERY, October 1916, pg. 217, col. 1: _Philadelphia Butter Buns_ Soften one cake of compressed yeast in one-fourth a cup of lukewarm water; add one cup of scalded and cooled milk and about one cup and a half of bread flour and beat all together until smooth. Cover and set out of draughts to become light. Add one-fourth a cup, each, of melted shortening and sugar, two egg-yolks, beaten light, one teaspoonful of salt, grated rind of one lemon and bread flour for a dough. (About three cups of (Col. 2--ed.) flour will be needed). Knead until smooth and elastic. Cover close and set aside to become doubled in bulk. Turn upside down on a board, roll into a rectangular sheet, brush over with melted butter, dredge with one or two tablespoonfuls of sugar and a teaspoonful of cinnamon, then sprinkle with half a cup of currants and roll as a jelly roll. Cut into pieces about an inch and a quarter long. The dough will make about twenty pieces. Cream one-fourth a cup of shortening; beat in one-fourth a cup of brown sugar and spread the mixture on the inside of a cast iron frying pan of suitable size. Let stand until doubled in bulk. Bake about half an hour. The sugar and butter should glaze the bottom of the buns. Serve, turned upside down, glazed side up. From AMERICAN COOKERY, December 1919, pg. 357, col. 1: _Philadelphia Butter Buns_ Make a sponge of one cake of compressed yeast, one-fourth a cup of water, one cup of scalded milk, and one cup and one-half of bread flour; when light, add one-fourth a cup of sugar, one-fourth a cup of butter, melted; two egg-yolks, one-half a teaspoonful of salt, the grated rind of one lemon, and flour for dough; about two cups of flour will be required. Knead until smooth and elastic. Cover close and set aside to become doubled in bulk. Turn upside down on a board, roll into a rectangular sheet, spread with softened butter, dredge with sugar and cinnamon, sprinkle with currants and rolly as a jelly-roll. Cut into pieces about (Col. 2--ed.) an inch and a quarter long. The dough will make sixteen buns. Butter well the bottom of a pan of proper size and dredge generously with brown sugar; set the buns on the sugar and let become light. Bake in a moderate oven. Turn upside down. The sugar and butter should glaze the bottom of the buns. Three or four tablespoonfuls of butter and a generous half-cup of sugar are none too much on the pan. From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 4 05:18:19 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 22:18:19 -0700 Subject: Footnote on Campbellites In-Reply-To: <200008040400.VAA01047@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: I don't know of any association with predestination, but the movement started in the South by Alexander Campbell evolved into the Disciples of Christ denomination, known usually in the South as the Christian Church, which also gave rise to the Church of Christ, a more conservative and evangelical denomination sometimes referred to as the "non-piano-playing Campbellites". Rudy From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 4 05:26:02 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 22:26:02 -0700 Subject: Texas vs Bostonian vowels In-Reply-To: <200008040400.VAA01047@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: While the usually very front Southern /ae/ can be perceived in Boston as the diaphonemic equivalent of /ar/ [a], the latter is actually phonetically closer to the "Confederate vowel" (Sledd), the monophthongized pronunciation of /ay/. My favorite example of inter- regional differences in interpretation comes from a Texas lady named Kaiser, who on checking into a Boston hotel for an NCTE convention and giving her name to the clerk, saw him write it down as "Carser". Rudy From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 06:04:13 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:04:13 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm talking about the period between the September equinox and the December solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 4 06:54:55 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 23:54:55 -0700 Subject: fall and autumn In-Reply-To: <012001bffdd9$d375b360$7105f9c1@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >... "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist >violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes >me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to >replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. More likely some stylistic rule that makes the change. Reminds me of that list of songs printed somewhere, that included "African-American is the Color of My True Love's Hair." RIma From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 10:40:54 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:40:54 +0100 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: Paul Frank wrote: > > For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, > the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm > talking about the period between the September equinox and the December > solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd > sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald > Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist > violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes > me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to > replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. > Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the Find & Replace option. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 11:09:36 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 13:09:36 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: > Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, > instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for > the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the > Find & Replace option. > --Aaron It may have been an editorial decision at the IHT, but I somehow doubt it. The word autumn crops up every day in the New York Times. Americans are of course free to choose between the words fall and autumn. This is from this morning's edition: "General Motors disclosed last March that it was taking a smaller step in the same direction, using suspension changes to lower the frame rails on its new Chevrolet Blazers, GMC Envoys and Oldsmobile Bravadas by up to two inches as they are introduced this autumn." http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/080400ford-suv.html Britons did once say fall or at least "fall of the leaf." Burchfield explains in The New Fowler's: "The third season of the year was called the autumn from the 14c. onwards, and also, in the British Isles, the fall of the leaf or simply the fall from the 16c. until about 1800. As time passed, autumn settled down as the regular term in Britain, whereas the fall of the leaf (less frequently the fall of the year) and then fall by itself gradually became standard in America from the late 17c. onwards. Autumn and fall are familiar names to everyone in each of the two countries, but in day-to-day speech autumn is the only standard form in BrE and fall is equally standard in AmE." In 1965 Sir Ernest Gowers remarked "As was said in [H.W. Fowler's] The King's English, fall is better on the merits than autumn in every way, and we once had as good a right to it as the Americans, but we have chosen to let the right lapse." Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 11:26:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 07:26:51 -0400 Subject: Autumn & Fall in NYT Message-ID: Searches of the New York Times online show that "fall" is used four or five times as often as "autumn" in the New York Times, even if one uses searches that avoid non-season meanings of the word "fall." Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:06:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Fred Shapiro To: American Dialect Society Cc: millerk at nytimes.com Subject: Re: question for safire's column On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > I still feel that the pallid idea is not part of the real signification > of "livid", based on its etym and the examples presented in OED. I > would be pleased to give way to other examples that show the association > between "livid" and paleness. All right, here are some examples showing the association of "livid" with paleness. I have not been precise about editions and page numbers, because my purpose here is not to trace a first use but rather to illustrate a common association: 1851 Herman Melville _Moby-Dick_ Threading its way out from among his grey hairs ... you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. 1880 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu _The Purcell Papers_ This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. _Id._ Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid. 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson _Treasure Island_ The sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle _The White Compnay_ His swarthy features blanched to a livid gray. 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle _The Adventure of the Yellow Face_ Its colour was what had impressed me most. It was of a livid chalky white. 1897 Bram Stoker _Dracula_ The last unconscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. 1904 Joseph Conrad _Nostromo_ Sotillo's ebony moustache contrasted violently with the livid colouring of his cheeks. 1906 Joseph Conrad _A Set of Six_ Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of the plains, shining with the livid light of snows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From stevek at SHORE.NET Fri Aug 4 12:05:34 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:05:34 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008040442.VAA14459@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Arnold Zwicky wrote: > apostrophe's used for the plural. do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" etc. --- Steve K. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 02:20:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:20:35 +0800 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 8:05 AM -0400 8/4/00, Steve K. wrote: >On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Arnold Zwicky wrote: > >> apostrophe's used for the plural. > >do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? > >"fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" >etc. > >--- Steve K. To respond to the earlier query: Yes, the label is very British-sounding, since "greengrocer" is not really used this side of the pond to my knowledge, but since the apostrophe is used for plurals here too (the questions of when and by whom and why were discussed on ads-l and Linguist List a few years ago) and since there's no alternate label for the phenomenon, we just borrowed it from our transpondian cousins. I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. larry From RonButters at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 14:34:45 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:34:45 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. From jester at PANIX.COM Fri Aug 4 14:42:42 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:42:42 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: from "RonButters@AOL.COM" at Aug 04, 2000 10:34:45 AM Message-ID: > > In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > > << I don't know ANY label for the > innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> > > Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. You're nodding here, Ron! Scare quotes are different--these are quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way (e.g. the thing being quoted is not the usual term, or represents a troublesome viewpoint, or whatever). _Scare quotes_ refer to one possible correct use of quotes. The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. Jesse Sheidlower From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Fri Aug 4 14:46:08 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:46:08 -0400 Subject: "scare quotes" Message-ID: I've seen these quotes used often in display ads in the Yellow Pages. I speculate that they are used in some cases because they do attract attention, and are easier to specify in writing the ad copy than showing italic or bold face, which the writer may not know how to specify, if not an experienced copy editor. I suspect that many Yellow Pages ads are written by store owners and such, who most likely do not know proofreader's marks. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 02:53:09 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:53:09 +0800 Subject: fall and autumn In-Reply-To: <398A9DB6.1D272D18@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: At 11:40 AM +0100 8/4/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >Paul Frank wrote: >> >> For some time I've been wondering why I come across, or think I come across, >> the word fall more often than the word autumn in the New York Times. I'm >> talking about the period between the September equinox and the December >> solstice, not the other meanings of "fall." I've just come across this odd >> sentence in a New York Times article published in the International Herald >> Tribune: "Since the autumn of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist >> violence has become a fact of German life" (IHT, August 2, p. 5). This makes >> me think that a New York Times slot man or drudge makes it his business to >> replace the word fall with the posher but in my opinion uglier word autumn. >> > >Perhaps it was an editorial decision at the IHT rather than the NYT, >instead. In British Englishes, it's never "fall", always "autumn" for >the season. To me, it just looks like somebody hit "select all" in the >Find & Replace option. > >--Aaron As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on the autumn of a sparrow. --Larry ================= August 1, 2000, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 9; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: German Faults 'Silence' About Attacks on Immigrants BYLINE: By ROGER COHEN DATELINE: BERLIN, July 31 ... Many Germans with no sympathy for rightist violence are troubled by the large number of foreigners, particularly Turks, in the country and by suggestions that Germany must embrace multiculturalism. As a result, politicians have been generally hesitant to broach the questions raised this weekend by Mr. Fischer. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has become a fact of German life. It is ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ rooted principally in the east, where, since the collapse of the Communist state there, youth unemployment has remained high, alienation widespread and broad exposure to foreigners a novelty. ================ From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 14:59:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 15:59:15 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: > In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: > > << I don't know ANY label for the > innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> > > Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. > I don't think those are scare quotes, though. To me, scare quotes can be paraphrased as 'so-called' or 'nudge-nudge, wink-wink'--they indicate that the writer doesn't really intend the meaning or the attitude implied by the phrasing. As in: Joe loves his "vitamins" but I just hope the cops don't catch him with those pills. (I.e., we all know Joe's vitamins are really quaaludes or some such thing.) But what Steve and Larry were talking about was the use of quote marks for emphasis. This sign at a library used to drive me crazy (still does when I think about it): "Absolutely" "NO CHANGE" will be given for the copy machines (quote marks as in original) Here, we don't have the reversal-of-intention indicated by scare quotes. The quote marks are just used as a kind of underscoring. I think we did talk about these once before here and called them 'emphatic quotes' or some such thing, but they don't seem to have an established name. Drives me crazy. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jessie at SIRSI.COM Fri Aug 4 15:02:25 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:02:25 -0500 Subject: Texas vs Bostonian vowels Message-ID: rudy troike wrote... > While the usually very front Southern /ae/ can be perceived in Boston as the diaphonemic equivalent of /ar/ [a], the latter is actually phonetically closer to the "Confederate vowel" (Sledd), the monophthongized pronunciation of /ay/. And I believe the "Confederate vowel" is different from what I was describing in North Alabama, where the dialect is not Coastal Southern (monopthongized /ay/), but Highland Southern (at least those were the generalized groupings I remember), where most everything is raised. Jessie Emerson (who is quite rusty at phonological descriptions) From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 4 14:54:34 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:54:34 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At 10:42 AM 8/4/2000 -0400, you wrote: >The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", >is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. > >Jesse Sheidlower > While we're at it, why not simply "emphatic quotes"? Generalized emphasis certainly seems to be the common factor in this kind of usage of quotation marks. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 15:20:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:20:15 +0100 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: > As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software > decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times > of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I > wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on > the autumn of a sparrow. > > --Larry Such editing errors are not uncommon in newspapers. I used to have a small collection (I suppose I still do, somewhere) of examples of "African American" being substituted for "black" by search-and-replace methods at newspapers. My favorite was about a company being "back in the African-American." One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how non-literal newspapers are about quote marks (as anyone who's ever been misquoted knows). Americans are regularly Anglified in foreign newspapers, and vice versa. I remember being struck by this when reading a South African newspaper's interview with Macaulay Culkin (surely, picked up from a news service, rather than interviewed there), in which MC complains that his "Mum" still makes him "tidy my room" (surely he said "Mom" and "pick up my room", the latter of which would be incomprehensible to South Africans). I suppose this is considered OK in the context of quoting, just as quotes would be preserved in translations into another language. But it usually annoys literalist me. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From RonButters at AOL.COM Fri Aug 4 15:34:54 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:34:54 EDT Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" Message-ID: Well, it will be fun to tell my Intro to Linguistics class next semester about how even someone as brilliant and experienced as I am can walk around for years with a slightly idiosyncratic definition in his head for a term of art in his own profession and not notice that he was marching to a different flautist. Jesse S defines SCARE QUOTES as "quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way." YES!--and I've always assumed that "worthy of attention in some way" included the desire merely to be emphatic (as well as ironic). Sol, I guess, do most of the people who sell "fresh" vegetables. Still, if Jesse and Lynne Murphy (not to mention the NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, which I have just consulted) says I'm "wrong" about the definition of "scare" quotes, then I will just have to revise my mental lexical entry. I have always used the term SCARE QUOTES to refer to any quotation marks that do not appear actually to quote anybody, without speculat ing as to the motive of the writer. I guess my overgeneralized interpretation of the term stems from the very fact that there "is" no distinct, widely known American term for purely emphatic quotation marks (except maybe "emphatic quotation marks"?). That and the fact that using quotation marks purely for emphasis seems pretty scaring to me. And the fact that it is often not possible to tell the "scare" quotes from the "emphatic" quotes (can anyone tell me which of the sets of quotation marks in my this paragraph are "scare" quotes and which are "emphatic" quotes???--I must say, I like my deviant usage even if it is "wrong"). So the sign-painter who wrote "HANDICAP" PARKING on the sign in my local supermarket parking lot is not using scare quotes--unless she means to imply that the parking place so designated is for anyone who might use one of those special parking passes, whether actually qualified by disability or not? Wow! and, for that matter, "Wow!" In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:43:09 AM, jester at PANIX.COM writes: << You're nodding here, Ron! Scare quotes are different--these are quotes placed around something to indicate that the writer finds a particular term worthy of attention in some way (e.g. the thing being quoted is not the usual term, or represents a troublesome viewpoint, or whatever). _Scare quotes_ refer to one possible correct use of quotes. >> Lynne Murphy writes: <> From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:31:40 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:31:40 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: steve k.: do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" no. for one thing, they're not scarequotes. scarequotes are quotes (that is, quotation marks) used for one of their legitimate functions; the name "scarequote" denotes both form and function. if i said that, i should also be talking about the "greengrocer's possessive apostrophe". this would not be helpful terminology. i don't in fact have a special term for quotes used for emphasis. not even "greengrocer's quotes", though that would make sense. actually, i don't expect most americans to understand "greengrocer's apostrophe". i try to use it only when i think my audience will have heard the term already. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 4 16:17:04 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 09:17:04 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: --- Arnold Zwicky wrote: > steve k.: > > do you call them greengrocer's scarequotes, too? > "fresh" muskemelon's -- only "one dollar" >.... > actually, i don't expect most americans to > understand "greengrocer's > apostrophe". i try to use it only when i think my > audience will > have heard the term already. > > arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: is this peculiar to greengrocers only, is this common to all merchants, or is this use so common or widespread throughout all aspects of writing and printing in England that it is considered an accepted use of the apostrophe? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:51:33 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 08:51:33 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: ron butters: In a message dated 8/4/2000 10:20:32 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << I don't know ANY label for the innovative quotes-for-emphasis Steve mentions, though. >> Larry nodded here. The term is SCARE QUOTES--which I'm sure he knows. if larry is like me, he knows this term perfectly well, but doesn't have this meaning for it. i would imagine that the meaning he has is one given in the NSOED for SCARE-QUOTES: quotation marks placed round a word or phrase to draw attention to an unusual or arguably inaccurate use. this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), posting from home, where there's only a NSOED and an AHD3 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 16:12:08 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 17:12:08 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: James Smith asked: > > I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out > what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: > is this peculiar to greengrocers only, is this common > to all merchants, or is this use so common or > widespread throughout all aspects of writing and > printing in England that it is considered an accepted > use of the apostrophe? It's just called a greengrocer's apostrophe b/c one sees it a lot in hand written signs. It's found everywhere, but it's not accepted by those who know how to wield an apostrophe. I don't think that typical British people are more likely than Americans to know what 'greengrocer's apostrophe' refers to. That term is pretty much editing/prescriptivist jargon. While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 4 16:35:11 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 12:35:11 -0400 Subject: Fw: VERY interesting Message-ID: Margaret Lee writes: >>>>> Some of this sounds like information given by the tour guide at the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother when I visited there last summer. --- storkrn wrote: > This is in wide circulation on the net with no > attribution or other > identifying data. > > Subject: VERY interesting > > > > Life in the 1500s: > > [140 lines of double-quoted jokelore snipped -- MAM] <<<<< I'd call it MISinformation. And please, there was no need to quote the whole blame thing. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 4 16:40:31 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 12:40:31 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Gregory {Greg} Downing writes: >>>>> What's the commonest term for "greengrocer's apostrophe" here in the US ("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in reference to the US)? Or have language scholars in the US simply adopted what would seem to be a UK-coined and UK-oriented term? <<<<< My experience and personal usage history support your latter guess. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 17:06:36 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 18:06:36 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008031629.MAA29870@is2.nyu.edu> Message-ID: > >("greengrocer being, in my experience anyway, a UK term not often seen in >reference to the US)? In my lifetime, I don't ever remember seeing an actual greengrocer. It's always been a supermarket (or whatever your dialectal variant is). But, I do remember on channel 5 in Phoenix there was a feature on the news once a week or so with a guy talking about fresh produce. I (mis-)remember him having the title of greengrocer. Before the pervasive supermarkets, what were the people who selled fresh produce called? Besides farmers. --Aa "I'm feeling like a young whipersnapper" ron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 4 17:10:28 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:10:28 +0200 Subject: fall and autumn Message-ID: From: Laurence Horn > As Aaron suggests, this was an "editorial decision" (or a software > decision) at the IHT. The original article, appearing in the Times > of August 1, contained the sentences below (emphasis added). I > wonder if other issues of the IHT reflect on the autumn of man, or on > the autumn of a sparrow. > Many Germans with no sympathy for rightist violence are troubled by > the large number of foreigners, particularly Turks, in the country > and by suggestions that Germany must embrace multiculturalism. As a > result, politicians have been generally hesitant to broach the > questions raised this weekend by Mr. Fischer. > > Since the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade ago, rightist violence has > become a fact of German life. It is > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > rooted principally in the east, where, since the collapse of the > Communist state there, youth unemployment has remained high, > alienation widespread and broad exposure to foreigners a novelty. There I was thinking that when I read a New York Times article in the International Herald Tribune I was actually reading a New York Times article. Thanks for checking and sorry to have wasted bandwidth on this, but (idle) curiosity got the better of me. I wrote my comment in a spirit of what the Chinese call "pao zhuan yin yu": throwing a brick and getting a piece of jade in return, i.e. putting forth my inexpert opinion to induce another's learned response. That's how I feel about the American Dialect Society. As a non-linguist I find this list to be a pleasure to read. And an education. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:16:07 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:16:07 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: james smith: I understand what a greengrocer is, and figured out what a greengrocer's apostrophe is. What isn't clear: is this peculiar to greengrocers only, by no means. the name "greengrocer's apostrophe" merely suggests that greengrocers' signs are a common habitat for this particular species of apostrophe. is this common to all merchants, very common in advertising designed by merchants themselves. or is this use so common or widespread throughout all aspects of writing and printing in England it is widespread indeed in the writing of ordinary people, people who are not (in some sense) professional writers. and not just in england. for a while i was collecting examples from student papers in linguistics courses at ohio state, but they were just *too* frequent [note "usenet asterisks" for emphasis] for me to cope with. that it is considered an accepted use of the apostrophe? no, not in serious/professional/formal writing contexts, where it universally counts as an error to be corrected before publication (except in certain special circumstances, like the pluralization of letter names and numbers, where some or all style books call for an apostrophe). on the other hand, in what you might call "vernacular spelling", the greengrocer's apostrophe is so common, as a variant of the unpunctuated plural (i haven't come across a writer who uses apostrophe+S as mark of the plural 100% of the time it's available[1]), that it would be reasonable to think of it as part of norms for vernacular written english. in any case, the greengrocer's apostrophe seems so natural to so many writers of english - it's not the result of some sort of lapse of attention - that an account is called for. whatever its historical source might have been, it seems to fit right into the system of vernacular spelling. my hypothesis is that once writers have learned the use of apostrophe+S to mark the possessive, they generalize it from this one grammatical function with nouns to *all* grammatical functions of S with nouns (plural as well as possessive), and even to all grammatical functions of S (including the 3rd singular present with verbs - my ohio state data include things like "Mrs. Haas want's cheerleaders" [note unpunctuated plural!]). note that to do this, writers must tacitly appreciate the notion of "grammatical function", since they distinguish word-final S that is grammatically significant from other instances of word-final S: there's no tendency to spell KISS as KIS'S, PERHAPS as PERHAP'S, not to mention NERVOUS as NERVOU'S or PUS as PU'S. as usual, to make a common "error", you have to understand quite a bit about the structure of the language (and, also, in this case, something about the spelling system). [1] for most vernacular writers, apostrophe+S seems not to be available for pluralizing words that end in S: CLASS'S for CLASSES is rare. on the other hand, HORSE'S for HORSES is common, so this is entirely a matter of spelling, not pronunciation. i don't know what the facts are for words ending in SH, CH, TCH, etc.: ?BUSH'S, ?PEACH'S, ?BATCH'S. surely someone has studied this. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:43:51 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:43:51 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Fri, Aug 4, 2000 6:06 PM +0100 "Aaron E. Drews" wrote: > Before the pervasive supermarkets, what were the people who selled > fresh produce called? Besides farmers. > If there was a time in the U.S. when there were separate stores for produce and nonperishable foods, I'm not old enough to remember it, or didn't live in the right parts of the country. I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to that time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those who owned or managed them, "grocers." These stores sold both fresh and canned/packaged/frozen food. The larger ones usually housed a separately owned and operated butcher shop that sold only meats. They did not sell drug store items like medicines (though they may have sold a few Band-Aids, some Aspirin and perhaps a few very basic cosmetics, like hand cream--that I don't remember), nor toys, shoes, clothes, etc. > > --Aa "I'm feeling like a young whipersnapper" ron I, on the other hand, can't believe that what I just wrote counts as "history" instead of "the way it was about a couple of years ago." Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 17:45:24 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: lynne murphy: While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily determined by very general principles of english spelling that even careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. we've got a prenominal possessive consisting of a base nominal word and an S marking the possessive. massively, quite generally, such words should - must - be spelled with an apostrophe. any rational person would want an apostrophe here too. as it happens, the standard spelling system makes an exception for definite personal pronouns (even ONE'S and SOMEONE'S etc. have an apostrophe), for reasons that aren't relevant here and wouldn't be known by ordinary people anyway, and ITS is the *only* one of these that is both transparently segmentable into subject pronoun plus S and usable prenominally. the spelling of possessive ITS (versus KIT'S) should offend anyone who craves system, generalizations, etc. and it does. i can argue for the semiotic utility of possessive 'S versus the unpunctuated plural and verb form, but i can't defend possessive ITS, the spelling of which runs just counter to good semiotic principles. i'll continue to spell it without an apostrophe, just as i'll continue to spell the verb LOSE, but i can't defend either of these spellings on rational grounds, and i won't waste any time tut-tutting at people who spell them "wrong". arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:25:47 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 13:25:47 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to that > time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those who They're still called "grocery stores" by many people, including me. I hear "grocery store" far, far more often than "supermarket." I say "grocery store" always. I don't think I've ever uttered the word "supermarket." During my childhood, a grocery store was often referred to simply as "the store." E.g., "She's not here right now. She went to the store." --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 4 18:34:46 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:34:46 +0100 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky: > lynne murphy: > > While in the US last week, I read 'it's' for 'its' on printed Sam > Adams promotional materials in TGI Fridays... In my back-and-forth > experience, catastrophic apostrophic use is thriving on both sides of > the Atlantic and both sides of the equator. > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. True that this is a different issue, but not totally unrelated, I think, since I think it indicates a general confusion about apostrophes. The same promotional table-menu also used an apostrophe to pluralize TV. (They're giving away TV's.) But some people don't balk at apostrophes in pluralizing acronyms/abbreviations, proper names (my mom insists on "The Murphy's"), and decades (the 90's). Students and (copy-editing) clients often say, when I mark a greengrocer's apostrophe in their writing (or when they try to convince me that I need one in a plural I've made), that without the apostrophe, the plural just doesn't _look right_. And so it seems to me that the proliferation of apostrophes in style-book unsanctioned places has something to do with the perception that words with suffixed 's' need punctuations to 'look right'. Since copyediting has gone out the window at many publishers' and advertisers' offices, and since the written word has become more democratic now that you don't need a printing press to get your typed thoughts to millions, I expect that traditional use of apostrophes is a lost cause. But in the meantime, I'm all for standardization of punctuation in writing (punctuation can make or break readability), and the old standards are all we have that can be called standard. > i can argue for the semiotic utility of possessive 'S versus the > unpunctuated plural and verb form, but i can't defend possessive ITS, > the spelling of which runs just counter to good semiotic principles. > i'll continue to spell it without an apostrophe, just as i'll continue > to spell the verb LOSE, but i can't defend either of these spellings > on rational grounds, and i won't waste any time tut-tutting at people > who spell them "wrong". There's nothing rational about English pronouns, so far as I can tell. (If it's _himself_ and _themselves_, why not _youself_ and _usselves_? If _it's_ should be an OK possessive, what about _her's_ and _their's_?) But in my experience, people do _want_ to use them in the standard ways, they just don't always know how to do that. I do think it's something worth continuing to teach, and when I see advertisers misusing them, I don't feel bad at all about tut-tutting at them. Advertisers misinform us about enough things that I am happy to take offense at their role in confusing people about apostrophes! (Kellogg's cereals and BASF tapes are on my IT'S list as well!) OK, I'll shut up now. I promise. No more on apostrophes from me. Lynne From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:40:33 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:40:33 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041825.NAA01655@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: --On Fri, Aug 4, 2000 1:25 PM -0500 Natalie Maynor wrote: > Peter McGraw wrote: > >> I AM old enough to remember when supermarkets were a new thing. Up to >> that time, stores that sold food were called "grocery stores" and those >> who > > They're still called "grocery stores" by many people, including me. > I hear "grocery store" far, far more often than "supermarket." I say > "grocery store" always. I don't think I've ever uttered the word > "supermarket." > > During my childhood, a grocery store was often referred to simply as > "the store." E.g., "She's not here right now. She went to the store." > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." I, too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means a food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department store, for instance. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Fri Aug 4 18:30:36 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 14:30:36 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041745.KAA01416@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: It's an important question. The answer: IT'S's No problem. bob > From: Arnold Zwicky > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily > determined by very general principles of english spelling that even > careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's > apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i > only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. From dumasb at UTK.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:32:49 2000 From: dumasb at UTK.EDU (Bethany K. Dumas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 14:32:49 -0400 Subject: Newed help re ILS Request Message-ID: The UT library (Dep't of Interlibrary Srervice) just told me that they cannot find the ff. item anywhere: > CITATION REQUEST: > TI TITLE (ENGLISH AND NON-ENGLISH): Teaching Suprasegmental Features of > Network English to Brazilian Portuguese Learners > AU AUTHOR(S): Rabello,-Elizabeth > SO SOURCE (JOURNAL CITATION): CTJ-Journal; 1999, 37, Mar, 20-24. > JN JOURNAL TITLE: CTJ-Journal > CO CODEN: CTJJET > DT DOCUMENT TYPE: aja Abstract-of-Journal-Article > LA LANGUAGE: English > CP COUNTRY OF PUBLICATION: Brazil > PY PUBLICATION YEAR: 1999 If you have access to the article, please wrirte me privately. Thanks, Bethany From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 4 18:36:48 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 11:36:48 -0700 Subject: those low vowels again Message-ID: back on 26 july, discussing "barak" vs. "arafat", i said: the second vowel of "barak" is almost invariably back well, now i've heard a CBC announcer ("As It Happens") interviewing various people about the talks, and she resolutely had a front vowel for the stressed vowel of "barak". most of the people she interviewed had a back vowel, but one had a front vowel throughout - whether as part of his variety or as an accommodation to her, i couldn't of course tell. my impression is that in certain contexts, like proper names, the two vowels count, in some sense, as being equivalents, despite their being clearly distinctive elsewhere in the language. what i mean is that i suspect that many (?most) speakers don't even register the vowel quality differences between "bar[a]k" and "bar[ae]k", etc., and probably couldn't tell you which vowel someone they were talking to had used. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Fri Aug 4 19:12:48 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 15:12:48 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: In editing a manuscript recently, I confronted the accordion of the greengrocer's apostrophe placed after double quotes, which seemed a bit much to.me. So I made a bold edit, and lopped out the apostrophe, changing people who drop their "r"'s to people who drop their "r"s. Good thing the r-dropping wasn't at the end of a direct quotation! Those would be scare quotes for sure! Joe Pickett Bob Haas on 08/04/2000 02:30:36 PM Please respond to American Dialect Society To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU cc: (bcc: Joe Pickett/Trade/hmco) Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) It's an important question. The answer: IT'S's No problem. bob > From: Arnold Zwicky > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:45:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) > > possessive IT'S is entirely a different matter from the ordinary > greengrocer's apostrophe examples. this spelling is so heavily > determined by very general principles of english spelling that even > careful writers who would never in their lives commit a greengrocer's > apostrophe still produce a certain number of possessive IT'Ses [yes, i > only did that to annoy; but how *should* i spell it?]. From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 4 21:29:35 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:29:35 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into "gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house now".) GAT From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 11:54:00 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:54:00 +0800 Subject: On Campbells and camels (and scare quotes) In-Reply-To: <14DBD9D6380@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: At 4:29 PM -0500 8/4/00, GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer >named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine >Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. >C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs >on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: > "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." >When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into >"gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend >was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what >misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house >now".) > I have a tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers (the "Singin' Brakeman"--to use a pair of non-scare, non-emphatic quotes) that includes the song "In the Jail House Now", so it's evidently a Jimmie Rodgers song (or did Rodgers borrow it from elsewhere?). It's sung by Steve Earle, who employs a [b] in both Campbell and gamble. The opening couplet, as sung here, is actually I had a friend named Campbell He used to rob, steal and gamble (but as it develops he drank a lot too). >(I don't recall what misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house now".) Well, since you asked... He went tomcattin' one night When he started a big fight And a big policeman came and knocked him down He's in the jail house now. I told him over again Quit drinkin' whiskey, lay off of that gin. He's in the jail house now. As for those "fresh" quotes, I certainly do use "scare quotes" all the time, a term I first learned in philosophers' circles, but never for what I'd be happy to call "emphatic quotes". Glad to see Jesse, Lynne, Arnold and others had the same take. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 12:12:24 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:12:24 +0800 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" In-Reply-To: <200008041716.KAA01050@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Thanks to Arnold for his (predictably) great post on the principles underlying these wayward ''s (note that those are two apostrophes, not a double quote), but I seem to recall at least one additional parameter that emerged in our earlier discussion of these: their prevalence after (orthographic-)vowel-final nouns, as well as (or especially in) foreign imports. That is, I've seen "taco's" or "burrito's" more often than, say, radio's or tomato(e)'s (although I'd expect "tomato's" more often than "tomatoe's", as the apostrophe seems correlated with some sort of islandhood for the noun undergoing pluralization. Or maybe those plurals in -os just don't look quite kosher, so the apostrophe is discreetly placed between them as a revival of the old practice of bundling (to change ethnic metaphors), just to keep the -o and -s from getting too intimate with each other. Larry P.S. Cf. also "Chevy's", for those for whom neither "Chevys" nor "Chev(v)ies" looks right. In fact, I'm beginning to be convinced there is a connection between the above and those equally wayward apostrophes in pluralized names ("the Horn's"). Maybe this islandhood-preservation thing is part of the story? From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 00:23:25 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:23:25 -0400 Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: When I was in journalism school at UNC, I learned the term orphan quotes, which referred as I remember it, to those quote marks thrown in for emphasis. A little bit of spice, I suppose, and orphaned because the material within came not from an actual quote. I suppose that they are free-floating quotes, which writers can reach up and pull from the air in order to pepper their writing with emphasis and excitement. Is anybody familiar with the term? bob > From: Laurence Horn > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:54:00 +0800 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: On Campbells and camels (and scare quotes) > > As for those "fresh" quotes, I certainly do use "scare quotes" all > the time, a term I first learned in philosophers' circles, but never > for what I'd be happy to call "emphatic quotes". Glad to see Jesse, > Lynne, Arnold and others had the same take. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 12:40:25 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:40:25 +0800 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:34 AM -0400 8/4/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >Still, if Jesse and Lynne Murphy (not to mention the NEW OXFORD ENGLISH >DICTIONARY, which I have just consulted) says I'm "wrong" about the >definition of "scare" quotes, then I will just have to revise my mental >lexical entry. I have always used the term SCARE QUOTES to refer to any >quotation marks that do not appear actually to quote anybody, without speculat >ing as to the motive of the writer. I guess my overgeneralized interpretation >of the term stems from the very fact that there "is" no distinct, widely >known American term for purely emphatic quotation marks (except maybe >"emphatic quotation marks"?). That and the fact that using quotation marks >purely for emphasis seems pretty scaring to me. And the fact that it is often >not possible to tell the "scare" quotes from the "emphatic" quotes (can >anyone tell me which of the sets of quotation marks in my this paragraph are >"scare" quotes and which are "emphatic" quotes???--I must say, I like my >deviant usage even if it is "wrong"). > >So the sign-painter who wrote "HANDICAP" PARKING on the sign in my local >supermarket parking lot is not using scare quotes--unless she means to imply >that the parking place so designated is for anyone who might use one of those >special parking passes, whether actually qualified by disability or not? > I think the key is that the wielder of scare quotes is sophisticated enough to (purport to) know the accurate use of a given term and uses the quotes to indicate that the term in question is not to be taken at face value (it's a cousin of the similarly metalinguistic "[sic]"), while the user of what we're calling emphatic quotes is too unsophisticated to NOT know that quotes are not ("correctly") used for marking emphasis. larry From P2052 at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 02:35:40 2000 From: P2052 at AOL.COM (P2052 at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:35:40 EDT Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" Message-ID: I don't get it. I've never heard of scare quotes, but I do know that quotation marks are used to enclose words used in a special or ironic sense. For emphasis, words are rendered in bold print or capital letters, or are underlined or italicized (or any combination of the preceding). In fact, almost any unusual presentation of a word will draw attention to it, including enclosing it in quotation marks; however, the grammar books/style manuals that I've used as a guide do not cite quotation marks as a device for emphasizing a word. P-A-T From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sat Aug 5 03:07:37 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 22:07:37 -0500 Subject: On Campbells and camels Message-ID: And Colonel Sanners advertised his finger-lickin' chicken without a -g-. DMLance GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > I have had since the 1960s an LP by an itinerant black street singer > named Pink Anderson, called, as I recall, Pink Anderson, Medicine > Show Man. (Pinkney Anderson, born February 12, 1900, in Laurens, S. > C. -- this from The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.) One of the songs > on the record is "He's in the Jail House Now." This contains a line: > "I have a friend named Camel, he used to drink and gamel. . . ." > When I used to listen to this, I very acutely translated "gamel" into > "gamble", but it was years before it occured to me that Pink's friend > was (in my pronunciation) named Campbell. (I don't recall what > misadventure befell Camel in the song, but "he's in the jail house > now".) > > GAT From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 4 15:33:05 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:33:05 +0800 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:35 PM -0400 8/4/00, P2052 at AOL.COM wrote: >I don't get it. I've never heard of scare quotes, but I do know that >quotation marks are used to enclose words used in a special or ironic sense. >For emphasis, words are rendered in bold print or capital letters, or are >underlined or italicized (or any combination of the preceding). In fact, >almost any unusual presentation of a word will draw attention to it, >including enclosing it in quotation marks; however, the grammar books/style >manuals that I've used as a guide do not cite quotation marks as a device for >emphasizing a word. P-A-T They wouldn't mention it (except for purposes of condemnation), any more than they'd mention putting in apostrophe's [sic] as an alternate device for indicating plurality. Both are vernacular practices, not authorized by prescriptive grammars or attested in most descriptive ones, but (for better or worse) neither is particularly rare in the English-speaking (or rather English-writing) world. Larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 05:21:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 01:21:50 EDT Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: "So I rounded up all my electrical appliances...and I said look, I know what's going on, and cut it out!...So then I got in the elevator, and I pressed the button, and the doors closed, and it refused to move. And the elevator said to me, I heard what you did to the toaster." --Woody Allen, "Electrical Appliances," a routine from his live stand-up comedy album of the 1960s. I have never felt the urge to talk to my refrigerator. "The Interent Home" is featured on AOL News today. You'll soon be able to talk to all of your electrical appliances. You can wake up and greet your coffee pot with "Wassup?" Here, from the story, are some terms we might have coming: HAM-CAM--Whirlpool is even considering installing a camera inside the oven so cooks can check on a roast from the office (or anywhere). A. Jared Headley, a Cisco manager who helped design the home, and his co-workers call it the "ham-cam." HOME INTEGRATORS--And before much longer, Cisco predicts, a huge market will develop for what it calls "home integrators," or companies that will wire your home, install everything, sell you a range of services, and make sure everything keeps working. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 05:58:17 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 01:58:17 -0400 Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Congratulations, Fred, a clear case of livid genius. Seriously, your research seems to indicate that livid is, if not all things, several different things to many different people. Livid kudos, bob > From: Fred Shapiro > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 10:57:54 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: The True Meaning of "Livid"? > > Is it possible that "livid" has been > used for centuries as an intensifier, that a livid red is an intense red, > a livid gray is a very pale gray, etc.? How else to explain a word whose > etymological roots relate to blue, but which has been strongly associated > with anger, with fear, and with death? From rkm at SLIP.NET Sat Aug 5 06:07:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:07:28 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041551.IAA29766@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: >this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as >hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of >us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within >the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. Excellent point, actually. More frequently, the restaurants who say "fresh" are actually using from frozen or concentrated orange juice. Now I'll only get annoyed at the non-freshness, not the quotes as well. I've gotten into the habit of asking the server "Is this fresh, fresh - from a live orange?" And I know we've had a discussion already on doubling. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Sat Aug 5 06:07:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 23:07:28 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <754588.3174378033@dhcp-218-202-123.linfield.edu> Message-ID: re the names for the people- As a kid, the grocery store sold staples - like flour/canned goods/etc. My mother might say (after sending me on an errand) "Ask the grocer... Other comestibles were purchased separately. The butcher sold meat (Ask the butcher for...). However, while we would go to the fish market and the produce stand - I have no recollection at all of what those proprietors were called. Maybe my mother never had me ask them questions? Rima From lmedu at JPS.NET Sat Aug 5 09:25:21 2000 From: lmedu at JPS.NET (Sharon Vaipae) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 02:25:21 -0700 Subject: apostrophe catastrope Message-ID: >this is why quotes-for-emphasis so often strike many of us as >hilarious or absurd. "FRESH" ORANGE JUICE! appears to some of >us to be saying that the orange juice is not in fact fresh within >the meaning of the act, but merely faux-fresh or fresh-like. This may have some connection with the fresh frozen tuna at my local supermarket (and refusing to accept the loss of traditional apostrophes use, I am doing my best to teach plural vs possessive to my students). Sharon Vaipae LMedu at jps.net English teacher at Duncan-Russell High School, Tracy, CA The truth shall make you odd. -Flannery O'Conner From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Sat Aug 5 12:20:51 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:20:51 +0100 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: <200008041836.LAA02038@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer (...on Ehud Barak) This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. Thanks, Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Sat Aug 5 13:10:01 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 08:10:01 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." I, > too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means a > food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department store, > for instance. This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about others of you? I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:14:03 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 09:14:03 -0500 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) Message-ID: Aaron, You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is from Nebraska. As to the relationship between Canadian English and Standard Spoken American English, you first have to narrow what you mean by Canadian English. The Maritimes and Labrador and Newfoundland have some pretty distinctive dialects, but if you go with southern Ontario you have some that shares quite a lot with Inland Northern. In fact, my own Canadian Raising, and I'm from south of Detroit, is pretty much like what you hear across the Detroit River. Shifting between Ontario Canadian and Inland Northern is not difficult. Herb Stahlke <<< aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK 8/ 5 7:25a >>> >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer (...on Ehud Barak) This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. Thanks, Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:17:53 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:17:53 -0400 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Aaron E. Drews wrote: > English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? Peter Jennings. (Tom Brokaw is American.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 14:19:39 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:19:39 -0400 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Aaron E. Drews wrote: > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? And Robert MacNeil. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:40:10 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:40:10 EDT Subject: common practices in descriptive "grammars" Message-ID: In a message dated 8/4/2000 11:42:17 AM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes: << ... scarequotes are quotes (that is, quotation marks) used for one of their legitimate functions; the name "scarequote" denotes both form and function. ... >> In a message dated 8/4/2000 11:32:12 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << Both are vernacular practices, not authorized by prescriptive grammars or attested in most descriptive ones, but (for better or worse) neither is particularly rare in the English-speaking (or rather English-writing) world. >> I realize that we are talking here about punctuation, which is normally not much discussed in "descriptive grammars," but even so doesn't it logically follow from the above that "descriptive" statements that ignore commonplace linguistic practices are failing their descriptivist duty? I'm a little confused when linguists of the stature of Arnold Zwicky use--even if only as a kind of shorthand--terms such as "legitimate" to describe commonplace practices such as scare quotes, thereby consigning emphatic quotation marks to "illegitimacy." From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:47:06 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:47:06 EDT Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace Message-ID: LIES & STATISTICS This is from "Everything new is old, scholar's searches find" by Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY, 14 June 2000, pg. 3D: Who first used the phrase "lies, damned lies and statistics"? Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli in his posthumously published autobiography in 1924. The earliest reference Shapiro (That would be Fred Shapiro, some librarian in Yale Law School--ed.) could find came from an 1896 statistics journal that turned up in a search of JSTOR, a subscription Web site that indexes core scholarly journals. The Making of America database (Michigan) has NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, January 1867, pg. 241, "Nothing lies like figures." The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November 1892, pg. 379: It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." I have an 1880s hit somewhere at home, but didn't post it because I thought Mark Twain had it earlier. -------------------------------------------------------- LAND FOR PEACE A friend of mine saw a cartoon in which an old American Indian approaches the Israeli prime minister and says, with some irony: "Land for peace!" The friend asked me about the phrase. Literature Online has John Weever, THE WHIPPING OF THE SATYRE (poem, 1601): Which spite of spites, Still like Mount Sion stands, In gowned peace clapping her happy hands. No land for peace, no peace for happinesse... John Banks, THE UNHAPPY FAVOURITE (play, 1682): ..and Cowards That sell the Land for Peace and Childrens Portions... From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 15:56:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:56:51 EDT Subject: Fred Shapiro on NPR Message-ID: A librarian at the NYPL just told me that he heard Fred Shapiro on NPR today (Saturday) talking about the "computer bug" and "software." Check the NPR website (www.npr.org I think). From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 5 16:27:26 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 09:27:26 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: larry horn: I seem to recall at least one additional parameter that emerged in our earlier discussion of these: their prevalence after (orthographic-)vowel-final nouns, as well as (or especially in) foreign imports. yes, indeed. i considered mentioning this, but didn't because i thought we'd had a pretty extensive discussion on this topic a while back. certainly someone with my family name is sensitive to the issue. is my family the Zwickys? the Zwicky's? the Zwickies? (i opt for the first, but both the other versions are attested.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:17:37 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:17:37 -0400 Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace In-Reply-To: <200008051547.LAA09852@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November > 1892, pg. 379: > > It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of > veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." > > I have an 1880s hit somewhere at home, but didn't post it because I > thought Mark Twain had it earlier. Once again Barry's brilliant research has hit pay dirt! I would of course be interested in the details of the 1880s hit. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:24:37 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 10:24:37 -0700 Subject: common practices in descriptive "grammars" Message-ID: ron butters: I'm a little confused when linguists of the stature of Arnold Zwicky use--even if only as a kind of shorthand--terms such as "legitimate" to describe commonplace practices such as scare quotes, thereby consigning emphatic quotation marks to "illegitimacy." fair enough. "legitimate" was a poor choice of words, and it drew attention away from the main point i was trying to make in my original paragraph, which was that "scarequotes" denotes both form (quotation marks) and function (some sort of ironic distancing), so that "greengrocer's scarequotes" would be contradictory, given that "greengrocer's" denotes a different function (emphasis). part of the problem lies in the fact that this thread began with a discussion of departures from prescribed writing practice, so the implicit point of view was that of the norms for formal writing. in this context, emphatic quotation marks are literally illegitimate, that is, contrary to the rules. that fact was, however, beside the point in my posting. i was also in the process of shifting the point of view to that of linguistic description, where the rules are whatever principles people seem to be following in their speaking and writing. given that, it would have been better for me to have gone back and removed any allusions to standardness. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), hearing a little barbie voice saying, "writing is hard - let's go shopping!" From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:53:36 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 12:53:36 -0500 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) Message-ID: Almost, Herb. Yankton is across the Missouri in South Dakota. DMLance Herb Stahlke wrote: > Aaron, > > You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is > from Nebraska. > > As to the relationship between Canadian English and Standard Spoken > American English, you first have to narrow what you mean by Canadian > English. The Maritimes and Labrador and Newfoundland have some pretty > distinctive dialects, but if you go with southern Ontario you have some > that shares quite a lot with Inland Northern. In fact, my own Canadian > Raising, and I'm from south of Detroit, is pretty much like what you > hear across the Detroit River. Shifting between Ontario Canadian and > Inland Northern is not difficult. > > Herb Stahlke > > <<< aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK 8/ 5 7:25a >>> > >well, now i've heard a CBC announcer > > (...on Ehud Barak) > > This brings up another question that I may have asked before but I > forgot the answer. For some reason non-linguists hold "broadcaster" > English to be the "standard" (FN: Are these scare quotes? :-) ). In > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any > other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? > Funnily enough, I don't get much American national news here. > > I've got to define what "standard" is, and what people use as a > standard. The school of thought here is that Canadian English and > standard U.S. English are two separate entities and I'd like to point > out the irony of the Canadian news anchors. > > Thanks, > > Aaron > > -- > ________________________________________________________________________ > Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh > http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and > aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics > > Bide lang and fa fair \\ // > \\// / > / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 5 17:52:26 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 13:52:26 -0400 Subject: Lies & Statistics; Land for Peace In-Reply-To: <200008051547.LAA09852@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > The Making of America database (Cornell) has LIVING AGE, 5 November > 1892, pg. 379: > > It has been said by some wits that there are three degrees of > veracity: "Lies, d--d lies, and statistics." A slightly earlier version of this quotation appears in an article in The Economic Journal, June 1892, by Robert Giffen. At page 209 of this article we find: "An old jest runs to the effect that there are three degrees of comparison among liars. There are liars, there are outrageous liars, and there are scientific experts. This has lately been adapted to throw dirt upon statistics. There are three degrees of comparison, it is said, in lying. There are lies, there are outrageous lies, and there are statistics." Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 19:25:30 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 15:25:30 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: In a message dated 8/5/2000 12:37:55 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes: << is my family the Zwickys? the Zwicky's? the Zwickies? >> Arnold prefers ZWICKYS, but it seems to me that ZWICKIES is much more appropriate, given its resemblance to WHEATIES, the choice of champions, COOKIES, and other wonderful things. (What, though, is a WHEATY?) My family, unfortunately, will have to be the BUTTERSES, I guess, which looks like the name of a family of Celtic languages spoken by that very unfortunate character in William Boroughs novel, NAKED LUNCH. From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Sat Aug 5 19:27:32 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 20:27:32 +0100 Subject: CBC (was: those low vowels again) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Aaron, > >You may be thinking of Peter Jennings, who is Canadian. Tom Brokaw is >from Nebraska. Ooops. Tells you how often I watch(ed) NBC. > > the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Are there any >> other Canadians that are the models of standard U.S. English? > >And Robert MacNeil. From PBS? Thanks! --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Sat Aug 5 19:24:38 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 14:24:38 -0500 Subject: theme song lyrics Message-ID: Does anyone know where I can find the lyrics to old children's radio shows, specifically "Little Orphan Annie" and "Jack Armstrong" or does anyone know of a listserv ? Bob Wachal From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 19:34:54 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 15:34:54 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in any case hasn't the weird connotations)? From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Sat Aug 5 20:40:24 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 16:40:24 -0400 Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I went to a couple grammars to check myself, and I find that an orphan quote is simply any that is not properly attributed. To be more specific, a quote that is not properly introduced. So it's not the same as a "scare quote," but it is. Hmm, "scare" is perhaps a better name for these specific orphan quotes, but I suppose that I just enjoy using orphan quote since I learned it so early. Perhaps it's time to change a paradigm. I'll have to find my brain-jack. bob again > From: Bob Haas > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 20:23:25 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: From scare quotes to orphan quotes > > When I was in journalism school at UNC, I learned the term orphan quotes, > which referred as I remember it, to those quote marks thrown in for > emphasis. A little bit of spice, I suppose, and orphaned because the > material within came not from an actual quote. I suppose that they are > free-floating quotes, which writers can reach up and pull from the air in > order to pepper their writing with emphasis and excitement. Is anybody > familiar with the term? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 5 23:18:32 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 19:18:32 EDT Subject: theme song lyrics Message-ID: The Museum of Broadcasting (or is it the Museum of Television and Radio?) has one branch in Manhattan and one in California. As I've said before, I've rarely found it helpful. You'll have to plan an all-day outing to hear "yadda, yadda, yadda"--if they have that. However, I'm sure the Museum has the audio of radio theme song lyrics. John Javna wrote a book about tv theme songs which I have, and it has stuff like Brady lyrics and lost Star Trek lyrics. He didn't do radio shows. The Museum has a small, generally unhelpful research staff, but you can contact them and ask anyway. 25 West 52nd Street New York, NY 10019 (212) 621-6600 http://www.mtr.org From maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU Sat Aug 5 23:55:19 2000 From: maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU (A. Maberry) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 16:55:19 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008051310.IAA08755@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Natalie Maynor wrote: > > I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently > during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying > whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that > that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) I don't. I say either I'm going "to the store" or "to the grocery store" but never "to the supermarket". However, I hear it from time to time. Allen maberry at u.washington.edu From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sun Aug 6 01:03:01 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 18:03:01 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" Message-ID: ron butters: My family, unfortunately, will have to be the BUTTERSES, I guess... i'm sorry. this is irretrievably silly, and a bit naughty as well. maybe your family could be the SPREADS. or the CAPRICORNS. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 01:17:01 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:17:01 EDT Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" & Martinez/Martini Message-ID: I always thought that the change from Martinez to Martini was good, especially if you're having more than one. Martinez's? Martinezes? No! Martinis! Now, where is that damned statistics citation... From pds at VISI.COM Sun Aug 6 01:27:36 2000 From: pds at VISI.COM (Tom Kysilko) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 20:27:36 -0500 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the opposite side of the fold. Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife remembers it as a "cootie catcher". I can find neither "cootie catcher" nor "cooty catcher" in: DARE RHDAS RHWUD MWNID3 Chapman Wentworth and Flexner Ayto and Simpson Watts although they all have references to real and/or fanciful body vermin. Cootie catchers were mentioned on this list in 1993 in connection with a thread on Cooties. The term seems to be alive and well. AltaVista just gave me 1000+ hits for "cootie catcher", including instructions for making one (below, sans diagrams), and 2 hits for "cooty catcher", including the transcript of Terry Nichols' trial (also below). Are these things known by any other names? And what is their connection with cooties? ============================= http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/oklahoma/nichtranscripts/010298am.html Marife Nichols - Direct MR. TIGAR: Let me do it this way to save time. We offer M301, M303, M304, M306, M308, M309, and that's it, your Honor. MR. RYAN: No objection to any of those, your Honor. THE COURT: All right. They are received. BY MR. TIGAR: Q. Mrs. Nichols, could you just leaf through those and just tell the jury briefly what each one of them is. A. M301, it's a card for me that Terry made -- made. It's -- a welcome-back card. When I went to Philippines. Q. And is it made in the same way as the other ones? A. Yes. Q. Okay. All right. The next one. A. M303. He made a card for Nicole, "Daddy's little angel." M304, he made me a card. I think this is a Valentine's card. It says he loves me. M306, he made a -- what do you call it? Kootchie -- I don't know -- how do you call it in English? Q. A cooty-catcher? A. A cooty-catcher. Q. Is that folded paper with numbers on it for kids to use? A. Yes. ====================== http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/arthur/prunella/cootie/index.html 1. Start with a rectangular sheet of paper. Fold the bottom of the paper to the side of the page, to make a triangle. 2. Then cut off the flap above the triangle. 3. Now open the triangle and you'll have a square. 4. Fold one corner to the other corner diagonally. 5. Open paper. 6. Fold corners toward center of the paper 7. When all 4 corners are folded, your paper will look like this. 8. Flip your paper over so the folded sides are face down. 9. Again, fold corners toward center diagonally. 10. When all 4 corners are folded, your paper will look like this. 11. On the same side, write the numbers 1 through 8, putting one number in each triangle. 12. Hold the paper in front of you like a square. Fold it in half vertically and pen it back up again. 13. Then fold the square in half horizontally and open it back up again. Make sure that the numbers you've written are facing you. 14. Open each flap and write a fortune on each triangle inside. When your fortunes are written, close all the flaps. 15. Flip the paper over and color each square with a different color. 16. Flip the paper over again so that the numbers are face up. Fold the square in half, either horizontally or vertically. Slide your thumbs and fingers under the four flaps. 17. Finally, rotate your hands, bringing your thumbs and index fingers together. The cootie catcher should expand. The numbered triangles will disappear inside, like the middle of a flower when the petals close. Then open and play! ====================== ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sun Aug 6 01:38:10 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:38:10 -0400 Subject: apostrophes & grocers Message-ID: The discussion of apostrophes has led me to rethink my lifelong asumption that the little lawn signs --or similar postings-- that people put on their property reading, e.g., "The Hill's" were establishing ownership, that is, were irregularly (my polite evasion of the objectionable "illigitimate[ly]") -written possessives. They always made me think of the Scottish usage for the head of the clan, as in "The Campbell." Now I must suppose they were really meant to convey the plural. On the question of the American equivalent of "greengrocer," I associate the word /market/ with produce, and I think that insofar as there were separate establishments for fruits & vegs, they were called "vegetable markets" and "fruit markets" and the proprietors were similarly, fruit & vegetable men. There was a "fruit and vegetable man" who drove an open, canopy-covered, horse-drawn wagon into our neighborhood every few weeks in summer during the 30's in Lincoln, Nebraska. While the place where we shop is undoubtedly a "supermarket"-- selling everything from motor oil to playing cards, as well as groceries, produce, meat & fish, beer & soda -- we call it the "store," and what we buy there are simply "grocs" (pronounced "grocks"). A. Murie From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Sun Aug 6 01:52:47 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 21:52:47 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: At 8:27 PM -0500 8/5/2000, Tom Kysilko wrote, ostensibly about cootie catcher: >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an >option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the >device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is >repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the >opposite side of the fold. > >Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife >remembers it as a "cootie catcher". Me too, now that you mention it... > >Are these things known by any other names? And what is their connection >with cooties? Well, when I was in elementary school, I had no idea that cooties weren't imaginary. Of course, we'd accuse other kids of *having* them, even so. I remember vaguely using the cootie catchers to nip at other kids' arms. -- Alice Faber tel. (203) 865-6163 Haskins Laboratories fax (203) 865-8963 270 Crown St new improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu From johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU Sun Aug 6 02:20:22 2000 From: johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Johanna N Franklin) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:20:22 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: I remember (from about 10-12 years ago) "cootie catcher" being common, but I also remember "fortune teller." Johanna Excerpts from mail: 5-Aug-100 cootie catcher by Tom Kysilko at VISI.COM > I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school > kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) The subject chooses an > option written on a fold of the paper, the fortune-teller manipulates the > device with four fingers revealing another set of options. This is > repeated twice more, the last choice revealing the fortune written on the > opposite side of the fold. > > Although I remember the device, I remember no name for it. My wife > remembers it as a "cootie catcher". From bkane at TIGGER.JVNC.NET Sun Aug 6 03:01:57 2000 From: bkane at TIGGER.JVNC.NET (Bernard W. Kane) Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 23:01:57 -0400 Subject: further to livid Message-ID: >From the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (Barnhart 1988) s.v., p. 604: livid _adj._ having a dull-bluish or grayish color. Probably before 1425 _livide,_ in a translation of Chauliac's _Grande Chirurgie,_ borrowed from Middle French _livide_ and Latin _lividus,_ from _livere_ be bluish. Latin _livere_ (formed from a lost adjective *livos, Indo-European _*liwos, Pok. 965) is cognate with Old Irish _li_ color, Welsh _lliw,_ Old Slavic _sliva_ plum {Ed.: ah, there, Slivovitz!] and Old English _sla, slah_ SLOE. The modern extended use of angry, as if livid with rage, is first recorded in 1912. The hit from 1425 is probably a contribution of one of Sol Steinmetz's collection of Middle English specialists who worked on the book. Bernie Kane word-finder mailto:bkane at tigger.jvnc.net From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Sat Aug 5 04:38:34 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 21:38:34 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Net verifies both names: http://www.3w-zeitschriften.de/ElliottSteven/ElliottSteven0811821374.htm http://www.funorama.com/ Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com > -----Original Message----- > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf > Of Johanna N Franklin > > I remember (from about 10-12 years ago) "cootie catcher" being > common, but I also remember "fortune teller." > > Johanna From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 06:18:34 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:18:34 EDT Subject: Billy Goats; Hush Puppies; Snicker Doodle; Dutch Nanies; Romeo & Juliet Message-ID: More food. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BILLY GOATS _billy-goat date cake._ A cookie made with dates and nuts. As noted by Betty Fussell in _I Hear America Cooking_ (1986), it is specific to the Pacific states after the Deglet Noor date was introduced from Arabia into the Coachella Valley in California in 1890. The reason for the cookie's name is not known. --John Mariani, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD & DRINK (1999). From AMERICAN COOKERY, June/July 1939, pg. 25: THIRD PRIZE (American Prize Cookies. "Lime Snaps" and "Bleeding Hearts" placed ahead--ed.) Elsie Loy Benney, Kansas OLD-FASHIONED "BILLY GOATS" 3/4 cup butter 1 1/2 cups light brown sugar 3 eggs, beaten 1 cup nut meats, chopped 1/2 pound raisins or chopped dates 4 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon soda 2 tablespoons buttermilk Cream the butter and the sugar together and add the beaten eggs. Stir in the nut meats, the raisins or dates and the vanilla. Sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon and cloves, and add alternately with the soda dissolved in the buttermilk. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan and bake about twenty minutes in a moderate oven. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HUSH PUPPIES (continued) As I've said, I've finally located the "hush puppy" point of origin to Tallahassee, Florida. From AMERICAN COOKERY, June/July 1940, pg. 40, col. 2: QUERY No. 6214.--"Can you possibly tell me what 'hush puppies' are and how the name originated?" _"Hush Puppies"_ The "Cricket Tea Room Cook Book" answers the question as follows: 3 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 tablespoon melted shortening 1 1/2 cups milk Cornmeal to make stiff batter Beat the eggs and add to the liquid; add remaining ingredients and drop from a spoon into the deep, but not too hot, for used in frying the fish. They are delicious with fish. The story of the origin of hush puppies is: In a camp near Thomasville, Georgia, where fishermen and hunters congregate, the negro cook made this bread. While the men were eating, and to pacify the hungrry dogs, they would throw pieces of bread to them with this admonition: "Hush, puppies." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SNICKER DOODLE (continued) From the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 September 1919, pg. 22, col. 3: SNICKER DOODLE One cup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 cup of milk, 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 2 unbeaten eggs added last; put in flat pie tins and spread with cinnamon and sugar. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DUTCH NANIES From AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1941, pg. 613, col. 2: QUERY No. 6340.--"I am enclosing some recipes you asked for in your February issue." WIth thanks to Mr. M. L., of Washington, we include these recipes which he quotes from "The United States Regional Cook Book," edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. _Dutch Nanies_ 4 eggs 1/2 cup sifted flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter, softened Confectioners' sugar Lemon juice Beat the eggs thoroughly, sift the flour and salt together, add alternately with the milk, a little at a time, beating until the batter is smooth. Spread butter over the bottom and sides of an unheated ten-inch frying pan. Pour the batter into the frying pan and set in a hot oven at 400 deg. Fah. Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, reducing the heat gradually to moderate (350 deg. Fah.) during baking. The pancake should puff up at the sides and be crisp and brown. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar (powdered sugar) and lemon juice. If you wish, you can put sliced banana on also. Then roll up like an omlet. Serve on a hot platter. _Note:_ The words "Dutch Nanies" come from the name Dutch Banana Pancakes. "Nanies" is a corruption of the word bananas. That's "Dutch Nanies"? I was thinking back to my days in Amsterdam and the question "Who's your Nanny?", but no... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- ROMEO AND JULIET From CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 December 1900, pg. 21, col. 1: ...A French scholar, suggested the following: MENU. Capitolade de boeuf sali aux pommes de terres. Jambonneau et haricots blancs, sauce Worcestershire. Fonceurs au beurre d'Armour et Cie. Pouding d'amidon. Cafe au lait. which was bawled out by the vulgar waiter thus: "Brown de hash, ham and----nine up, draw three, three Romeo and Juliets." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WIGGLE From AMERICAN COOKERY, August/September 1918, "Camp Cookery," pg. 97, col. 1: A group of dishes, we call inclusively if not accurately, "Wiggles"; meaning by that, any mixture served hot on crackers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- CANDY BUTCHER; HOT SODA (continued) Some earlier hits for these terms. "Trials of a Candy Butcher" is in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 January 1900, pg. 28, col. 3. "How to run a hot soda apparatus profitably" is in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 February 1900, pg. 39, col. 1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM This has gotta go in the OED. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream would not exist without this classic first. From AMERICAN COOKERY, "Tested Recipes of the Month," January 1943, pg. 213, col. 1: _CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM_ 2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk 1/2 cup water 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 7-ounce package semi-sweet chocolate, chipped 1 cup cream Mix milk, water, vanilla and chocolate; chill. Whip cream to consistency of soft custard; fold into chilled mixture. Freeze in refrigerator tray until half frozen. Scrape and beat until smooth but not melted. Replace in freezing unit until frozen. Serves 6. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 06:18:43 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 02:18:43 EDT Subject: GOP; Windy City; Bucket Shop; Stand Pat; Foot and Mouth; Weinerwurst; Hoochenoo Message-ID: I've looked through some of my papers and have rounded up every unposted item BUT "lies & statistics." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- G.O.P., G.O.M. & G.O.W. (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 August 1885, pg. 2, col. 2: MR. GLADSTONE is down with a throat disease. The g.o.m. cannot last much longer unless he gives the g.o.p. the slip, takes the advice of the g.o.w., his wife, and throws his night-key away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WINDY CITY (continued) This is totally useless! No one in Chicago will listen to anything I say! From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 10 October 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE Chicago _News_ has a four-column paragraph on the wickedness of that city, the sum and substance of which is that it is a more sinful city than Babylon. When a Windy City scribe starts out to knock out the Biblical writers, he stops at nothing. From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 17 October 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE League championship colors fly never so proudly as in CHicago. It is natural for the Windy City to be "the tenant of the pennant," as a Chicago Vassar girl would express it. Why a Chicago girl should use sesquipedalian words her detractors must explain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BUCKET SHOP (continued) From the DETROIT EVENING JOURNAL, 5 May 1885, pg. 3, col. 3: ORIGIN OF "BUCKET SHOPS" The Three-Cornered Fight to be Soon Adjusted. (...) "By the way, how did bucket shops originate?" "A man in Chicago who had dealt considerably on the board went to a broker one day and wanted to be allowed to take a deal of 1,000 bushels of wheat. The broker couldn't possibly do it, and the man asked him to go into a 5,000 bushel deal, letting him take 1,000 bushels of it. Th commission man finally turned to his would-be customer and said: 'If you want to deal by the bucketful go down into one of those open shops.' But the name has lost its significance because the board of trade in Chicago allows trades of 1,000 bushels of wheat or 50 barrels of pork. It used to be nothing less than 5,000 bushels of wheat or 250 barrels of pork. None of the bucket shops, except some of the little ones, will permit transactions any smaller than those of the board." (...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- STAND PAT (continued) From the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 7 July 1885, pg. 4, col. 6: "STAND pat and bet high" is Gambler Truman's rule when he has a poor poker hand. Carter Harrison's appointments show that he can stand Pat to quite an unlimited extent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 18 April 1885, pg. 2, col. 3: THE "foot and mouth" disease is epidemic in Washington. After considerable breaking out in the mouth, chinning for an appointment, the victim has to foot it back home for lack of car fare. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- WEINERWURST (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 20 March 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: WEINERWURST sausage is being imported from London. The hydrophobic scare has caused the slaughter of 10,000 dogs in the metropolis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- HOOCHENOO See DARE, which has an 1877 citation with a different spelling. From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 6 March 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: GOV. SWINEFORD, of Alaska, takes a hand in editing a newspaper of Sitka. The copy at hand declares "The Hoochenoo must go." At this distance it is difficult to make out what "the Hoochenoo" is, but presumably it is a slaughter-house democrat or a crooked city marshal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- STEALING COPPERS OFF A DEAD NIGGER'S EYES From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 3 April 1886, pg. 2, col. 2: TALK about "stealing coppers off a dead nigger's eyes!" A Cleveland (O.) undertaker has been convicted of stealing one of the eyes of a corpse. An Ohio man would steal an open grave. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SLUMMING (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 March 1884, "SEEING THE SLUMS," illustration caption: THE NEWEST WRINKLE OF METROPOLITAN SOCIETY--HOW FASHION FINISHES THE NIGHT AFTER THE OPERA AND THE BALL AND ENJOYS A NOVEL SENSATION AT THE EXPENSE OF MISERY AND VICE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DRAMA From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 9 May 1885, pg. 3, col. 3: In Boston it is called the "drawmah;" in New York, "drahma;" in Philadelphia, "drama;" in Chicago, "drammer," but in St. Louis they talk about the "draymy." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DIVA From the NEW YORK DISPATCH, 26 April 1885, pg. 4, col. 5: THE reason they call the great singers "divas" is because they know how to dive into the pockets of the public and get along swimmingly on the high C's. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MONEY TALKS (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 8 December 1883, pg. 3, col. 1: JAKE MILLER isn't booming quite so much as he was. Frank Evans has had to drop his "SIlent Man" out of his repertoire. "Money talks," says Evans, "and Miller's piece doesn't. That's why. Sabe?" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- O. K. (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 22 February 1883, pg. 2, col. 4: "MOTHER," said a slangy Cass avenue boy at the table, when company was present, "this butter is O. K., but the bread is N. G., and ought to get the G. B." "Just hear him!" exclaimed the fond mother; "he is such a beautiful Latin scholar that I don't pretend to understand a word he says!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- "NO CHECKEE, NO SHIRTEE!" (continued) "No Checkee, No Shirtee!" is the headline for a story in the CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 October 1897, pg. 25, col. 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- RUSH THE GROWLER (continued) From the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 19 January 1884, pg. 3, col. 4: The choicest beer of the celebrated Bechtel brand (brewage of 1883), ran like water, and every time the grand old beaker of Lemege faience ($1.99 at Ridleys), gave out, the venerable "growler" (as it was playfully entitled by some of the more volatile young Israelites present) was immediately borne to the nearest saloon, where, with a princely disregard of cost, it was quickly replenished with another quart of the amber fluid. "WORKING THE GROWLER" is the illustration caption and title of a story in the NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE, 26 April 1884, pg. 12, cols. 1-4. From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 6 08:55:24 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 01:55:24 -0700 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >...In >the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 6 08:55:24 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 01:55:24 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000805202736.00a1ea00@pop.visi.com> Message-ID: >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the 50s. RIma From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Aug 6 10:39:36 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 06:39:36 -0400 Subject: Dutch Nanies = Baby? Message-ID: I've made a recipe very similar to what Barry has given, but the product of it is called a "Dutch baby". I believe it is in the new ed. of the Joy of Cooking. I was curious about the origin then, more so now. Frank Abate From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Sun Aug 6 12:59:10 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:59:10 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: Rima wrote: >>>I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade >school >>>kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) >>Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the >>term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in >>particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the >>50s. The fortune-tellers I do not recall from my youth. My eight-year old is fond of making them. My wife and I remember the folde paper (beak-like) device as a cootie catcher. My memory of cootie catchers is from the early '50's. They were aimed at another's head as much as the arm. Perhaps the fortune-teller is the PC version of a cootie catcher. I haven't found any dictionary evidence of coctie catcher. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 6 12:09:08 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 07:09:08 -0500 Subject: Putin In-Reply-To: <28.8f1b37e.26bdc65e@aol.com> Message-ID: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? I've been quietly horrified at this pronunciation. I'm not about to complain about the extra vowel stuck out front on Mbeki, or the stress on the second syllable on Helsinki, but what could possibly be so overwhelmingly difficult about pronouncing an actual vowel in the second syllable in Putin? Surely that wouldn't violate any phonotactic constraint in English. This reaction isn't just prescriptive tsk-tsk-ing. Some time ago (before Putin was in the news) I saw an episode of Frasier in which one disreputable character addressed another with the endearment "pootn'", exactly the way Putin is now pronounced, and the laugh track came on. What kinds of connotations will trickle through popular culture when a world leader's name sounds like that? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Sun Aug 6 12:51:17 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 08:51:17 -0400 Subject: Putin Message-ID: One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. gravy." There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an old fart. RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's? Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 A unique dictionary that shows idiomatic and typical usage Trade paperback, 5?" x 8?", 1,300 pp., $7.99 / Cdn$11.95 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 Order from: utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM Sun Aug 6 14:31:11 2000 From: storkrn at EMAIL.MSN.COM (storkrn) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 07:31:11 -0700 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: original message: > >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school > >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) > > > Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the > term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in > particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the > 50s. > > RIma In central Connecticut in the 1950's I never heard of cootie catcher but I did hear of "flippers" as in: "If you children don't put those flippers away you will stay in during recess!" Sharyn Hay From RonButters at AOL.COM Sun Aug 6 16:44:37 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 12:44:37 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: Valid point, Tom, about POUTINE; maybe the fact that there are so many Canadians reading the news in the US makes POUTINE more influential on them than on the ordinary speaker of USA English (note that I carefully avoided reference to the native speaker). though (as you imply). That makes this a little like the choice between Urinous and Youranus. Still, I'm sure that Poutin would rather be associated with food than flatulence. As for the "normal" English stress, well, yes, there certainly is that tendency (though as we all know, English stress placement is notoriously complex)--and I am reminded now that LENIN and STALIN are both normally pronounced in American English with a schwa in the second syullable. Maybe that is the model. But doesn't semantics override phonetics in situations like this? In a message dated 8/6/2000 8:42:14 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: << One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. gravy." There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an old fart. >> From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sun Aug 6 18:20:49 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 13:20:49 -0500 Subject: Putin Message-ID: Obviously semantics does not override phonetics here. Ron, your observation speaks to generative models of speech production. The native (Germanic) stress rules for English place the stress on the first syllable when the second (and last) one is weak. The alternative pronunciation "PYU-t'n" doesn't seem to be available in American phonology nowadays. What do the British do with this name? Aside from unsavory semantics, this name raises some interesting questions for phonological theory. DMLance RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > .......--and I am reminded now that LENIN and STALIN are both normally > pronounced in American English with a schwa in the second syullable. Maybe > that is the model. But doesn't semantics override phonetics in situations > like this? > > In a message dated 8/6/2000 8:42:14 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: > > << One of many possible reasons, it seems to me, is that (poo.TEEN) is the > > pronunciation of "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) which, according to the Oxford Canadian, > > means "a dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and a sauce, usu. > gravy." > > There is also the English speaker's tendency to retract stresses to the first > > syllables of words. Of course, I am being facetious, if you will forgive an > old > > fart. >> From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Sun Aug 6 18:36:00 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 13:36:00 -0500 Subject: Formality in Lexico-Syntax Message-ID: In an e-mail to someone I know fairly well, I first wrote (a) and then decided to change 'bill' to 'invoice' because that's what will appear at the top of the document in question. When I did so, I felt compelled to add the "dative 'to'." I'm sure I could omit the 'to' in both (a) and (b) in conversation and could omit it in writing (a) but not in writing (b). (I'm doing the paperwork for the annual conference of the Council of Geographic Names Authorities.) (a) I'm preparing a bill to send you. (b) I'm preparing an invoice to send to you. Comments on your own behavior in the regard? DMLance From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 6 19:23:05 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 14:23:05 -0500 Subject: Putin Message-ID: Mai, You raise the more general question of what the phonesthetics of a word has to do with its meaning. We all know of obvious cases, like "teeny" and "humongous" and the role of ideophonic reduplication in name-calling, but your comment raises the cross-linguistic question of the phonesthetics of a name as pronounced in another language and the potential political implications of that. I suspect these are very much nonce phenomena, but they can have considerable impact. Herb <<< mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU 8/ 6 7:13a >>> > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? I've been quietly horrified at this pronunciation. I'm not about to complain about the extra vowel stuck out front on Mbeki, or the stress on the second syllable on Helsinki, but what could possibly be so overwhelmingly difficult about pronouncing an actual vowel in the second syllable in Putin? Surely that wouldn't violate any phonotactic constraint in English. This reaction isn't just prescriptive tsk-tsk-ing. Some time ago (before Putin was in the news) I saw an episode of Frasier in which one disreputable character addressed another with the endearment "pootn'", exactly the way Putin is now pronounced, and the laugh track came on. What kinds of connotations will trickle through popular culture when a world leader's name sounds like that? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 6 09:24:42 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 17:24:42 +0800 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <001801bfffb2$f8d603a0$66e1183f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 7:31 AM -0700 8/6/00, storkrn wrote: >original message: > >> >I recently encountered a device made of folded paper, that grade school >> >kids used for telling fortunes (when I was one.) >> >> >> Wow, haven't thought about those for years. But I *never* heard the >> term cootie catcher. I can't remember what, if anything in >> particular we called it, but it wasn't cootie catcher. NYC in the >> 50s. >> >> RIma > >In central Connecticut in the 1950's I never heard of cootie catcher but I >did hear of "flippers" as in: "If you children don't put those flippers away >you will stay in during recess!" > >Sharyn Hay Well, here and now in southern Connecticut, my daughter (now 15) spontaneously gave just "fortune tellers" for these grand school devices, but when prodded to come up with another name that other people used, did offer cootie catcher, so it's still around and evidently spreading a bit. Larry From brewer at MAIL.TKU.EDU.TW Sun Aug 6 23:37:24 2000 From: brewer at MAIL.TKU.EDU.TW (Warren Brewer) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 07:37:24 +0800 Subject: Putin Message-ID: > ... "poutine" (Cdn.Fr.) ... "a dish of french fries ..." Actually, the spelling _putin_ reminds me of French _putain_ 'whore'; so let's call him _poon-tang_ and let Bill bang his brains out. -----Warren Brewer. From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 00:50:07 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 20:50:07 -0400 Subject: First Published Use of "Internet" Message-ID: On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, susan wrote: > Can anyone tell me when and in what context and the word Internet was > first used? Thank you, Susan Gilbert mssmith at boone.net Here's still earlier information. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert Kahn are said to have used the term "Internet" in their paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," IEEE Transactiions on Communication Vol. Com-22, No. 5 (May 1974). Fred R. Shapiro Coeditor (with Jane Garry) Associate Librarian for Public Services TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD and Lecturer in Legal Research ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES Yale Law School Oxford University Press, 1998 e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu ISBN 0-19-509547-2 From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Aug 7 05:42:22 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 22:42:22 -0700 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: <200008070400.VAA19540@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had been successful. Rudy From rkm at SLIP.NET Mon Aug 7 06:25:36 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 23:25:36 -0700 Subject: Putin Message-ID: As a pronunciation editor, I would put in the dictionary the pronunciation of someone's name the way that person pronounced it. This is assuming that this is possible in English. Sometimes, however, foreign names used often enough do indeed get Anglicized. Think of Martina Navratilova. Rima From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:36:43 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:36:43 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008041442.KAA15764@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > The purely emphatic use of quotes, as in Steve's "'fresh' produce!", > is different, and AFAIK does not have a name. For what it's "worth," I always considered those to be scarequotes, although fresh "produce" would have been a better example than "fresh" produce --- Steve K. From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:49:12 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:49:12 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > Here, we don't have the reversal-of-intention indicated by scare quotes. > The quote marks are just used as a kind of underscoring. I think we did > talk about these once before here and called them 'emphatic quotes' or > some such thing, but they don't seem to have an established name. OK, Lynne and Larry have convinced me that they're a separate phenomenon, although I think I've heard scarequotes used for both the wink-wink nudge-nudge sense and the "emphasis" sense, maybe because of the lexical gap. --- Steve K. From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 13:52:45 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:52:45 -0400 Subject: The "right" definiution of " 'scare' quotes" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Well, it will be fun to tell my Intro to Linguistics class next semester > about how even someone as brilliant and experienced as I am can walk around > for years with a slightly idiosyncratic definition in his head for a term of > art in his own profession and not notice that he was marching to a different > flautist. Well, it's not idiosyncratic. I'm in your camp, it would seem. I apologize for not reading everything first and then commenting! --- Steve K. From johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU Mon Aug 7 14:05:28 2000 From: johannaf+ at ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Johanna N Franklin) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:05:28 -0400 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased with time, or was my school an anomaly? Johanna Excerpts from mail: 6-Aug-100 Cootie catcher by Rudolph C Troike at U.ARIZO > Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can > verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early > to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, > in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had > small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had > been successful. > > Rudy ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Combination of the Discoveries of Einstein and Pythagoras: E = m c^2 = m(a^2 + b^2) From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 14:08:33 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:08:33 -0400 Subject: Putin In-Reply-To: <28.8f1b37e.26bdc65e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 5 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Why do American TV announcers pronounce the name of the Russian leader > POOT-uhn (which sounds like a kind of euphemism for farting) instead of > poo-TEEN (which is surely closer to the way that the Russians say it, and in > any case hasn't the weird connotations)? Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 14:10:54 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:10:54 EDT Subject: Love Boat; Gorgy; Mary Jane; 50 Chowders Message-ID: LOVE BOAT The Monday, 7 August 2000 NEW YORK POST has a page three story about The Canaveral Star (Cape Canaveral, Florida), described by some as "the world's first floating bordello." The owner insists that "there is no sex"--just lap dances at sea. However, people seem to leave the VIP room happy. It's been called the "Love Boat." Also, the "Bordello Boat" and the "Stripper Ship." (Too bad the newspapers can't print a pun on "Titanic.") How about "Ship of Fools"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- GORGY Catholic League President William Donohue has called Al Gore's fundraiser at the L.A. Playboy mansion a "Gorgy." (NY POST, 7 August 2000, pg. 21, col. 1.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MARY JANE Did OED revise its "Mary Jane" entry? The earliest "Mary Jane"="marijuana" is from 1928. It's noted that "Mary Jane" was the name of slippers (from 1921). Did the popularity of the name "Mary Jane" come from elsewhere? The CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, January 1919, pg. 16, has an ad for the "penny specialties" of Charles N. Miller Co., Beverly and Traverse Streets, Boston, Mass. "Dearos" and "Mary Janes" were "Re. U.S. Pat. Off." The "Mary Jane" ads were in most every issue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- 50 CHOWDERS: ONE-POT MEALS--CLAM, CORN & BEYOND by Jasper White Scribner, NY 256 pages, hardcover, $30 2000 "Chapter 1: The Folklore and History of Chowder" is on pages 19-26. The timeline ends with: "2000 _50 Chowders_, by Jasper White, the first hardcover book of contemporary chowders, is published." Obviously, an important moment in recorded chowder history. There's not much new. "1894" includes a brief mention of Charles Ranhofer's THE EPICUREAN (the author states, without looking at other 1890s sources, that this may have been the birth of Manhattan Clam Chowder--in the recipe if not in the name), "1896" mentions Fannie Farmer's BOSTON COOKING SCHOOL COOKBOOK, and the next entry is a paragraph for "1900-1950." And that's not a great paragraph, either. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- PERSONAL (THERE'S A FJORD IN MY FUTURE) From Tuesday, August 8--Sunday, August 27, I'll be in Norway and Sweden. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:08:07 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:08:07 -0400 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: At this point the Muse compels (not "*Compbells") me to insert the following. Although the tune is probably unfamiliar to you, the verse is appropriate. -- Mark A. Mandel FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html ================================= Editors' Waltz Words (c) Mark A. Mandel 2000 ttto [i.e., to the tune of] "Witnesses' Waltz" (Leslie Fish) (NOTES: 1. The last line of the chorus changes each time. 2. In the last line of v.4, the stresses can be misleading, so I've marked a couple of them with a backtick (`) before the stressed syllable.) ---------- CHORUS: Twelve thousand, half million, million and more, Misplaced apostrophe's, commas, galore, Spelling misteaks run-on sentences too * You'd think we could find something better to do. Come on, Elizabeth, William and Ted, Grab your green eyeshades and pencils of red. We'll go for a stroll and we'll exercise... pique At what people do to the language they speak. [Chorus, ending with...] * The stories you'll hear are essentially true. The signs in the market are rather a mess, Selling _apple's_ and _pear's_ with apostrophe-"S". And saying their flounder is _quote, fresh, unquote_ Suggests it's just two or three weeks off the boat. * It's ignorance makes them behave as they do. Computer typesetting is ever so fine For breaking long words that run over the line. But here in the paper, I'm sorry to tell, It hyphenates "moonglow" between "G" and "L".** * Computers can be mighty ignorant, too. Next we'll drop in on a woman I know Whose data was wrecked, a day's work at one blow. A technical writer bears part of the blame Who `thought "substi`tute" and "replace" mean the same. * Let's hope it won't happen to me or to you. Some say we're nitpickers, pedants, and worse, That care for precision in writing's perverse. But tell me, would you want your car's brakes repaired >From manuals not written by people who cared? * Your life could depend on the work that we do! ---------- ** NY Times, Mar. 7, 2000, p. A20, col. 2, 2nd paragraph from the bottom From jessie at SIRSI.COM Mon Aug 7 15:56:39 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 10:56:39 -0500 Subject: Fortune Teller (was Cootie catcher) Message-ID: The device, if we are talking about the same thing, in the '70s in North Alabama was also "fortune teller" and had nothing to do with catching cooties. A very intricate series of physical descriptions and professions (for the potential mate--a very sexist game) was written on the segments of the fortune teller, and you chose numbers (written on the outer segments) to determine what segment you landed on. Jessie Emerson --- Johanna wrote: >Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased with time, or was my school an anomaly? From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:54:53 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:54:53 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher Message-ID: In and around NYC in the fifties & sixties I heard only "fortune teller". Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com (speaking for myself) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:13:03 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:13:03 -0400 Subject: usenet asterisks (was "greengrocer's apostrophe") Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky writes: >>>>> for a while i was collecting examples from student papers in linguistics courses at ohio state, but they were just *too* frequent [note "usenet asterisks" for emphasis] for me to cope with. <<<<< Not just usenet (aka newsgroups if I understand correctly), but in email and elsewhere. Since the only formatting that is safely transmissible on the Internet is whatever can be expressed in plain ASCII, and the use of ALL CAPS is associated with shouting, *asterisks* or _underscores_ are often substituted for italicization or underlining. Speaking of capitals, Arnold, may I ask why you habitually eschew them? -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Sr. Linguist & Mgr. of Acoustic Data 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 7 15:58:23 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 11:58:23 -0400 Subject: cross-threaded Message-ID: arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), hearing a little barbie voice saying, "writing is hard - let's go shopping!" =========== At the mall, not the store. -- Mark From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:11:17 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:11:17 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: << Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. --- Steve K. >> Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:13:34 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:13:34 EDT Subject: one more thing about apostrphes Message-ID: I keep getting a spam that has in the subject line: BRITNEY SPEARS [sic] BREASTS! These folks clearly never met a greengrocer! From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:12:38 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:12:38 -0400 Subject: cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: >In and around NYC in the fifties & sixties I heard only "fortune teller". In Westchester (northern NY suburbs) in the early-mid 60s, I'm pretty sure we used both. The town I grew up in was approximately 1/3 natives, 1/3 folks who'd moved out to the suburbs from NYC, and 1/3 in-migrants from the midwest. I remember being conscious of the resulting dialect m?lange (pop vs soda, what's the vowel in the first syllable of coffee and chocolate, etc) from an early age, so it's possible that "fortune teller" was the native/local term and "cootie catcher" an import, but I honestly don't know. As I posted elsewhere on this thread, we were very aware of metaphorical cooties but totally unaware that there was any real critter called cootie. I remember being shocked when (in high school, or perhaps even college!) I learned that cooties were lice. I don't even remember lice-checks (louse-checks?), though I suppose the school nurse must have done some kind of visual inspection. ============================================================================= Alice Faber new, improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu Haskins Laboratories old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 USA tel: (203) 865-6163 x258; fax (203) 865-8963 From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:19:51 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:19:51 EDT Subject: one moment at THE time Message-ID: If we have discussed this before, excuse me. My neighbor's car has a bumper sticker that says, "ONE MOMENT AT THE TIME"; for a while, I wasn't sure what this meant. After giving it some thought, I decided that it meant what I would express as 'one moment at A time'. I have heard--in the South--"one day at THE time" (as opposed to "one day at A time'), so I guess I should have been able to figure this out more quickly. One thing that stumped me was that (Unlike "He's still in THE bed" for "He's still in bed")? From katie at LING.LING.ROCHESTER.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:28:40 2000 From: katie at LING.LING.ROCHESTER.EDU (Katie Schack) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:28:40 -0400 Subject: Fortune Teller (was Cootie catcher) In-Reply-To: <00c301c00088$1301a100$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: In Southern Minnesota in the '80s, the term "cootie catcher" was used, although the actual use of the object was usually much more similar to telling fortunes than to catching cooties. I don't recall the term "fortune teller" ever being used to describe it. I'm wondering if there may have been another name as well, but if so I don't remember what it was. Katie On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Jessie Emerson wrote: > The device, if we are talking about the same thing, in the '70s in North > Alabama was also "fortune teller" and had nothing to do with catching > cooties. A very intricate series of physical descriptions and professions > (for the potential mate--a very sexist game) was written on the segments of > the fortune teller, and you chose numbers (written on the outer segments) to > determine what segment you landed on. > > Jessie Emerson > --- > Johanna wrote: > > >Oddly enough, though I remember these devices perfectly from the mid 1980s > on, and I do remember them being called cootie catchers, I don't remember > them being used to catch cooties. We used them mainly to tell fortunes, and > we might have snapped at each other with them, but I think the snapping was > just a secondary use and not necessarily intended to catch vermin. Could > the cootie catching have lessened and using them to tell fortunes increased > with time, or was my school an anomaly? > From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 16:29:37 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:29:37 EDT Subject: Putin Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 2:28:08 AM, rkm at SLIP.NET writes: << Think of Martina Navratilova. >> and Dusty Yevksy From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 7 16:36:19 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 12:36:19 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <97.904507a.26c039a5@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: > > << Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to > POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, > our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself > down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. > > Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a > phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? Most dictionaries leave stressed long-vowel syllables open, so actually the first syllable would probably be shown as POO (with the macron or connector or whatever symbol is used to represent the oo of poo) and the t would be placed in the second syllable. I should have represented it above that way. --- Steve K. From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Mon Aug 7 16:45:39 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 09:45:39 -0700 Subject: usenet asterisks (was "greengrocer's apostrophe") Message-ID: mark mandel: Speaking of capitals, Arnold, may I ask why you habitually eschew them? some years ago i noticed that a colleague used lower case only and asked her why. she said that it significantly improved the speed and accuracy of her typing. i have an odd approach to typing (something i devised myself at age 8), involving two fingers on the right hand for all the ordinary keys, with one finger on the left hand reserved for the shift key (and now ctrl and alt as well). it turns out that sticking to lower case significantly improves *my* speed and accuracy. now it's just the way i do things in speed mode. (writing manuscripts is a much slower process, so upper case, emacs commands, etc. aren't a problem.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 7 05:32:02 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 13:32:02 +0800 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <97.904507a.26c039a5@aol.com> Message-ID: At 12:11 PM -0400 8/7/00, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: >In a message dated 8/7/2000 10:09:08 AM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: > ><< Actually, when I researched his name, I found that it's closer to >POOT-yhn and is definitely not poo-TEEN. I checked with Russian sources, >our etymologist checked with a bigtime Russian acadmeic, and I sat myself >down and watched a newscast on Vremya to verify this. > > >--- Steve K. >> > >Thanks for the clarification--so it isn't a syllabification thing, it is a >phonemic-sequence thing. But why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? well, the former is too un-American-sounding, and the latter is pre-empted by the term (possibly not yet attested) for a demonstration of dogs and dog-owners protesting rabid enforcement of leash laws. larry From RonButters at AOL.COM Mon Aug 7 18:09:35 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 14:09:35 EDT Subject: POOCH-IN/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/7/2000 1:31:26 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes: << why don't Americans say POOT-yin or POOCH-in? well, the former is too un-American-sounding, and the latter is pre-empted by the term (possibly not yet attested) for a demonstration of dogs and dog-owners protesting rabid enforcement of leash laws. larry >> hee-hee--but better dogs than methane! And of course POOCH-IN can't have a schwa in the second syllable, whereas PUTIN can--virtually must. I'm sure I've heard PUTIN pronounced with a glottal stop in the middle and a syllabic final /n/--totally indistinguishable from the the euphemism for farting.ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 7 19:23:35 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 14:23:35 -0500 Subject: What does this mean? Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1517 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:54:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:54:59 EDT Subject: Jim Crow Message-ID: Some "Jim Crow" items. From the NEW YORK DISPATCH, 16 August 1885, pg. 6, col. 2: _JIM CROW._ BY CHARLEY WHITE It has occasionally been staed in some country journals from, unknown authority, that there was an individual named George Nicholls, a clown, who it is said sang Jim Crow in Western circuses before the late T. D. Rice made that song so popular. This rumor no doubt originated with a few persons in the equestrian business about the time of Rice's debut and success--1829. It seems rather unkind now at this late day to rob so great an artist of his laurels. I take great pride in mentioning the above case merely in support of Rice, my old respected and much-loved friend. I was an ardent admirer of his professional ability, and believe he was original in most of his productions. It appears to me that aggrieved parties or others of that time certainly had opportunities and time enough during the many years of Rice's success, to denounce the claim of Rice, or any intention or trespass on his part. However, as this was all anterior to my entree in the ranks of minstrelsy, or of compiling any record of similar events, I must necessarily handle the subject carefully, and at the same time live in doubt for want of more satisfactory authority as to the truthfulness of the foregoing statements. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, September 1909, pg. 91, col. 1: JIM CROWS Ten pounds of chocolate coating Four pounds of lozenge sugar Three pounds of roasted and chopped almonds Seeds of one vanilla bean Put three pounds Valencia almonds into a peanut roaster and roast until slightly brown in color, then turn out and chop or break into small pieces. Now have ten pounds of No. 1 chocolate coating melted and turned out on a warm marble slab, add to the chocolate four pounds or enough lozenge sugar to stiffen the chocolate to a thick paste, then add the chopped almonds; mix well, and leave the paste set in a warm, dry room over night; then add the seeds of one vanilla bean, mix well. Now knead the batch until it is cool or will dry off bright and glossy. Roll the batch into small sticks and one-half inches long and as (Col. 2--ed.) thick as a lead pencil; lay each stick on glazed paper; set in ice box until dry and hard. If the goods are dull and gray, they have beeen worked too hot or too cold. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:55:08 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:55:08 EDT Subject: Philadelphia Ice Cream; Teddy Bear; Mexican Chocolate; College Ice Message-ID: PHILADELPHIA ICE CREAM Last Sunday's New York Times, Week-in-Review section, had a front-page photo of a box of Vanilla Ice Cream used to describe the Philadelphia Republican national convention. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1909, pg. 114, col. 1: While ice cream is made in Europe mostly with the addition of eggs, or what is called frozen custard or Neapolitan cream, most of the ice cream in this country is made with pure cream, or milk and cream only, and is called "Philadelphia Ice Cream." The question of the relative merits of "Neapolitan" and "Philadelphia" cream is principally one of taste. Those who are fond of eggs and custards will prefer the former, those who are partial to pure cream, as well as those with whom eggs do not agree, will choose the latter. (Pg. 115, col. 1--ed.) VANILLA ICE CREAM (PHILADELPHIA STYLE) Three quarts cream, one and one-half pounds sugar, vanilla. Dissolve sugar in cream, soak vanilla in cream for some hours, stir often, and freeze. Or else cook cream as directed, strain and freeze. From CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, May 1910, pg. 94, col. 2: As we have stated in some previous articles, there are two distinct kinds of ice cream, viz., the "Philadelphia Ice Cream," which is made from pure cream and sugar, and the "Neapolitan Cream," which is generally made all over Europe. The first named cream is made throughout the country. Both are good; in fact, for puddings and different other frozen dishes, the Neapolitan cream is preferable on account of its smooth texture and rich color. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- TEDDY BEAR (continued) CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, August 1909, pg. 29, has an advertisement for a candy by Hawley & Hoops, New York: TEDDY (CHOCOLATE CANDY) BEARS 10 FOR 1 CENT THE WORDS "TEDDY" and "TEDDY BEARS" Registered in the U. S. Patent Office ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN CHOCOLATE (continued) CONFECTIONERS JOURNAL, "Hot Soda Recipes," December 1909, pg. 101, col. 1: _Chocolate Mexican._--The way they serve it in Mexico. One egg, one and one-half ounces chocolate syrup, one teaspoonful sweet cream, one-half teaspoonful cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful salt; shake well; strain in a cup; add one cupful of hot water. Top with a spoonful of whipped cream. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- COLLEGE ICE DARE cites DIALECT NOTES from 1913. "College ice" was another name for "sundae." This is from THE SODA FOUNTAIN, March 1906, pg. 30, col. 1: _College Ices._ (George)--A "college ice" is simply an ice cream over which has been poured a quantity of syrup, crushed fruit or fancy nut delicacies. The usual method of serving it is by first placing a cone shaped measure of ice cream in a flare champagne glass, then pouring over the ice cream the required flavor, the customer mixing it with the fruit as he eats it. Here are a few formulas from various sources: (1) Take the usual quantity of ice cream and pour over it a heavy chocolate syrup. Garnish with walnut halves, or a ladle of walnut russe. (2) Vanilla cream, New York Cream, in regular sundae cup; pour over ice cream. Port wine syrup, with grated nuts and top off with whipped cream and maraschino cherry. (3) Over a ladle of peach ice cream pour a sauce made of the following: One pound of mixed nuts chopped fine, mixed with 1 pint of rich maple syrup. (4) One dipper of ice cream, sliced orange cut in diamond shaped pieces, sliced pineapple cut in triangular shape, whole English walnuts, maraschino cherries. The nuts and fruits to be arranged artistically. No syrups used. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 02:55:18 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 22:55:18 EDT Subject: Danish Pastry (October 1921, AMERICAN COOKERY) Message-ID: DARE also cites Webster's 2nd (1934) for "Danish Pastry." Supposedly, the Danish baker of President Woodrow Wilson's birthday cake in 1917 also popularized "Danish pastry." I e-mailed Princeton University about any Woodrow Wilson scholar. No one responded yet. There's a WHITE HOUSE COOK BOOK, but it doesn't list all the White House chefs. The White House accepts e-mail, but doesn't really respond. (I last wrote to Hillary Clinton about the nickname of her home, "the Windy City," and got a meaningless, form letter response.) This is the "Danish Pastry" citation (there are pg. 198 two photos with the recipe: "DANISH PASTRY (SET TO RISE)" and "DANISH PASTRY (COOKED)") from AMERICAN COOKERY, October 1921, pg. 197, col. 1: _Danish Pastry_ Rinse a bowl and a wooden spoon in hot water, then in cold, letting cold water, changed once or twice, stand in the bowl (Col. 2--ed.) until the bowl is chilled. Then refill the bowl with cold water, and in it work 3/4 a cup of butter, with the spoon, until the butter is pliable and waxy throughout. Then pat it into two thin cakes, pressing out all water--wrap in a cloth and chill until hard. Sift three cups of bread flour with one-fourth a teaspoonful of mace and one teaspoonful of salt; rub one of the pats of chilled butter into the sifted flour until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Beat three eggs and stir them with one cup of sugar, two cups of milk, grated rind of one lemon and a yeast cake softened in one-fourth a cup of luke-warm water; combine this mixture with the flour mixture. Beat very hard, adding more flour slowly (five or six cups) until the whole mixture becomes too stiff to handle with a spoon. Turn the dough on (Pg. 198, col. 1--ed.) a floured board and knead until elastic. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with a cloth and place in refrigerator for one-half hour. Chill rolling-pin by placing on ice for one hour. Dredge the moulding board lightly with flour and roll out the chilled dough into a rectangular sheet. Have the sheet of dough a little more than twice the width and three times the length of the second cake of chilled butter. Set the butter in the middle of the lower half of sheet of dough, the greatest length of the butter over the greatest length of the dough. Then turn the dough lengthwise over the butter, thus folding the dough in the center, lengthwise, and enclosing the butter. Press the three open edges of dough together, then fold one end of the dough over and the other under the butter. There will now (Col. 2--ed.) be three layers od dough over and three under the layer of butter. Now turn dough around, in order to roll the sheet of dough in a direction opposite to the first rolling. Then pat gently with (?) and roll the dough into a long strip, taking pains to roll the butter between the layers of dough and without letting the dough break through to the butter. Fold to make three even layers with edges perfectly straight. Then turn dough half way round so as to roll in opposite direction. Repeat process three times. Place in refrigerator for one hour. Twist or roll or cut into desired shapes, arrange in buttered pans--brush with egg and milk mixture--set to rise in a warm temperature two hours, then place in refrigerator until next day. Bake in a moderate oven. Frost with confectioners frosting, tinted as desired; or sprinkle with chopped nuts just before baking; or use as tartlet paste, or as buns, etc. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 06:15:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 02:15:15 EDT Subject: THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915, by The Soda Fountain) Message-ID: THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915) was published by The Soda Fountain magazine. One period advertisement I saw said "by Bob Barnhardt." (Not of the flying Barnharts.) The NYPL's copy has no title page. THE SODA FOUNTAIN was an essential magazine of the soda fountain trade. David Shulman found "egg cream" in a 1906 issue, but the OED's pre-1940 "egg creams" have different ingredients under that name. An "egg cream" contains chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer (carbonated water). There is no egg and no cream. The NYPL catalog states "sent for filming 9-30-99." You can't get the microfilm copy of THE SODA FOUNTAIN. You can't get most of the hard copy issues. It's being filmed 9-30-99! I'll have to check it out at the Library of Congress when I return. THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY is 274 pages and has 1,700 soda fountain formulas. Pg. 41, col. 2--NEW ORLEANS MEAD This beverage, an old stand-by of a quarter of a century ago, is still a favorite in many localities. (Not in DARE--ed.) Pp. 68-69--RICKEYS. Pp. 69-84--Shakes and Egg Drinks. (Several Egg Chocolates are here, but no Egg Cream--ed.) Pg. 88, col. 1--FANCY MIXED DRINKS. (CHOCOLATE NOIR has chocolate syrup, milk, and ice cream; FROSTED CHOCOLATE has chocolate syrup, cream, and carbonated water--ed.) FROZEN CHOCOLATE This is an easily made and a satisfactory chocolate beverage. Shake together 1 1/2 ounces of chocolate syrup and 2 ounces light, sweet cream, or rich milk, with 2 ounces of shaved ice, then add carbonated water to fill a 12-ounce glass. Charge 10 cents. (Is this an "egg cream"?--ed.) Pp. 91-104--HOT SODA. Pp. 132-135--BANANA SPLITS. Pg. 154, col. 2--HOT FUDGE SUNDAE. Pg. 162, col. 1--SWASTIKA Slice 3 bananas, allowing the pieces to drop into a fruit bowl; add half a pint of crushed cherries, 2 ounces of shredded cocoanut and simple syrup q.s. Use one ladleful to each sundae. Sells for 15 cents. (W. R. Sampson.) (An ad for Huyler's in CONFECTIONERS' AND BAKERS' GAZETTE, 10 January 1908, pg. 1, col. 2, features a swastika. The NY Times ran a piece on the swastika last week--ed.) Pg. 209--SOME SWEET SANDWICH FILLINGS CUBAN SANDWICH To eight ounces of grape fruit marmalade add one half ounce each of chopped candied ginger and candied cherries. Spread thinly. From BBriggs at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 8 14:13:13 2000 From: BBriggs at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (Bonnie Osborn Briggs) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 09:13:13 -0500 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) Message-ID: I think this is a regional thing. I've always heard store rather than grocery store or supermarket. Usually if someone is going somewhere other that a grocery store, they call it by name, "I'm going to Target" or I'm going to Sears". However, there is a sticky twist to this situation now that the new "superstores" (Wal-Mart and K-Mart) are now selling groceries as well as the nine million other items they stock. Bonnie Briggs The University of Memphis Natalie Maynor wrote: > This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what > I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery > store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something > set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, > I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say > that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling > that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about > others of you? > > I do have one friend, from various places -- his parents moved frequently > during his childhood, who says going to "the supermarket" or buying > whatever at "the supermarket." I've kidded him about it and said that > that sounded weird. Do others of you use "supermarket" that way? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 8 15:58:07 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 08:58:07 -0700 Subject: "greengrocer's apostrophe" (was Re: Cam(pb)ell) In-Reply-To: <200008051310.IAA08755@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: --On Sat, Aug 5, 2000 8:10 AM -0500 > Peter McGraw wrote: > >> I didn't mean to imply that I ever say, "I'm going to the supermarket." >> I, too, say I'm "going to the store." "Going to the store" always means >> a food store (super or otherwise), never a drug store or a department >> store, for instance. And Natalie Maynor replied: > This interests me because I had been thinking not long ago about what > I considered the long-ago habit of saying "the store" for "the grocery > store." I had come across a reference to "the store" in something > set in the past -- part of Eudora Welty's _One Writer's Beginnings_, > I think, and I sat there thinking "I remember when we used to say > that." The fact that I thought about it that way supports my feeling > that I don't hear it used that way these days. But you do. What about > others of you? > You know, I think I've revived "going to the store" only recently, and I'm not sure why. My feeling is that it's been lying in my passive vocabulary for years, but for unknown reasons not pulled out and used. I think what I did before I revived it, and still do probably most of the time, is simply name the store. Because we get most of our groceries at Fred Meyer, most often I say, "I'm going to Freddy's," or less frequently, "I'm stopping at Albertson's on the way home," or (if I'm absolutely sure neither of those will have what we need, and we absolutely have to have it), "I guess I'll go to Safeway." I can't explain why, if my hunch about recent revival is right, I felt no need of a generic word for such a long time. Peter **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 8 16:08:42 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:08:42 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: I find Steve's comment very comforting. After using a diacritical system in my earliest dictionaries and a modified IPA in the 70's (to the acclamation of linguists like Marckwardt), I abandoned both in the 80's and started using a spelling-based system (and it IS a system as explained elsewhere). It's comforting to see professionals resorting to it whey they want to communicate with non-captive, extra-mural audiences (I'm trying not to overload. I could have added audiences that take everything from Oxford as Heaven-sent). And yes, the first syllable of "Putin" should be shown as (POO-) because it is a stressed long-vowel syllable, but my question is, should a symbol be used "to represent the oo of poo" because in English speech, as used by everyone except those just starting ESL, you don't ever end an open syllable (long or short, stressed or unstressed) with a short "oo." (Correct me if I am wrong). This is one of the premises on which my system is based. Isn't this is a good question? THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's? Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca "Steve K." wrote: > On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 > > Most dictionaries leave stressed long-vowel syllables open, so actually > the first syllable would probably be shown as POO (with the macron or > connector or whatever symbol is used to represent the oo of poo) and the t > would be placed in the second syllable. I should have represented it above > that way. > > --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 16:28:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:28:55 EDT Subject: Thousand Island Dressing; Six Pack; Mexican Salad Message-ID: THOUSAND ISLAND SALAD DRESSING (continued) From the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Good Eating section, 24 March 1999, pg. 6, col. 4: _Island hopping_ We keep hearing about iceberg lettuce making a comeback, so we thought about the 'berg's popular partner, Thousand Island dressing, would be worth a tasting. An Internet surfing expedition yielded some information about its origins: The dressing made its debut at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel at the turn of the century. How did it get there? One version from Thousand Islands Inn gives credit to George LaLonde Jr., a fishing guide in the resort town of Clayton, N.Y. Another credits Oscar Tscirky, maitre d' at the hotel. In both cases, the dressing was named for the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Waldorf owner George C. Boldt vacationed in the area. YOU correct the Chicago Tribune on history. By the way, Truman beat Dewey. Yes, Thousand Island dressing was served at the Waldorf, and the Waldorf owner did have a place in the Thousand Islands. Lots of people did. But the books I read about Oscar of the Waldorf don't mention the dressing! The web sites were you'll find the incomplete story include: http://www.1000-islands.com/inn/castle http://www.1000islandsdressing.com/legend.htm A 1914 "Thousand Island" citation is in the recent ADS-L archives. See "Current Messages" and "search" at the top of that on the www.americandialect.org site. "Thousand Island Salad Dressing" is on pg. 710, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1913. "Asparagus with Thousand Island Dressing" is on pg. 748, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, May 1919. "Thousand Island Dressing" is on pg. 454, col. 2 of AMERICAN COOKERY, January 1930. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SIX PACK "TAKE HOME! The Pabst Handy-Six" is a photo story in BREWERS JOURNAL, December 1949, pg. 30, col. 1. More on "six pack" if I search that journal later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MEXICAN SALAD There are many "Mexican Salad" hits for OED to use, if it wants. The recipes are often different. From AMERICAN COOKERY, November 1906, pg. 192, col. 2: _Mexican Salad_ Cut cold, boiled ham, cooked chicken, and cold, boiled potatoes into fine shreds or Juliennes. Take a cup of each, and mix with a tablespoonful and a half of olive oil, a scant tablespoonful of vinegar, a teaspoonful of grated onion, also paprika and salt as needed. When thoroughly mixed, set aside to become chilled and seasoned. In the mean time make ready a cup of shredded celery and one-third a cup of shreds of sweet red pepper. When ready to serve, mix the celery, pepper, and seasoned ingredients with enough mayonnaise dressing to hold them together. Turn them onto a bed of lettuce leaves. Garnish with quarters of hard-cooked egg and chopped white and sifted yolk of egg. From THE DISPENSER'S FORMULARY (1915) by the Soda Fountain, pg. 213: MEXICAN SALAD On a couple of lettuce leaves, place a slice of pineapple, three sections of sweet orange, half a dozen seeded malaga grapes, and a couple of Maraschino cherries. Dress with equal parts of whipped cream and Cream Salad Dressing. Sprinkle with ground nut meats and top with a green cherry. From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Tue Aug 8 16:48:10 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 12:48:10 -0400 Subject: interesting article Message-ID: In today's NYTimes Science Section there is an interesting article, "How Culture Molds Habits of Thought," that might be of interest, especially for folks familiar with the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis and what Steven Pinker calls mentalese. Where language fits into this picture is difficult to say. Joe Pickett http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/080800hth-behavior-culture.html From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 8 17:22:53 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 10:22:53 -0700 Subject: Cootie catcher In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The reply below comes closest of any to answering the question in the original query about what this device had to do with cooties. I never heard "fortune teller" as a name for this device until this thread, and I never saw that version of it. My only encounter with it until now was as a kid in Southern California, where you folded a piece of paper into the requisite shape, then drew spots on four facets and left the other four blank. You would open the device in the direction that revealed the blank facets, then use it to scoop the imagined cooties off the "mark" (I don't remember that it mattered where you scooped) and open it to reveal the facets with the spots, showing him all the cooties you had collected. The response, of course, was an intrigued, "Hey, how did you make that thing?" And another cootie catcher would soon be in production. Peter Mc. --On Sun, Aug 6, 2000 10:42 PM -0700 Rudolph C Troike wrote: > Just to contribute to the regional distribution of "cootie catcher", I can > verify that the term was used in Brownsville, Texas schools in the early > to mid 1940s. Mostly cooties were assumed to reside, presumably like lice, > in the hair, so the head was the main target of the device, which had > small circles and squiggles drawn in it for evidence that the effort had > been successful. > > Rudy **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 18:17:40 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:17:40 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/2000 11:59:36 AM, t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA writes: << And yes, the first syllable of "Putin" should be shown as (POO-) because it is a stressed long-vowel syllable >> Surely there are exceptions to this rule, e.g., where morpheme boundaries (or psuedo morpheme boundaries) are concerned? It would seem to me very unnatural to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 8 18:33:25 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:33:25 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 8 Aug 2000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote: > Surely there are exceptions to this rule, e.g., where morpheme boundaries (or > psuedo morpheme boundaries) are concerned? It would seem to me very unnatural > to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. > Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? There's a difference between syllabication dots for hyphenation, and the break one puts in showing a pronunciation. This is true of MW, RHC, WNW, and AHD. DUEL*ING is how the word would be split (in most, if not all American dictionaries) as a headword, but the pronunciation would be shown as doo'ling (with the appropriate diacritics). The point is, the breaks shown in a headword largely stem from typographical conventions, whereas the breaks shown in pronunciations have to do with vowel length, stress, and other factors. Furthermore, some morphemes are broken morphologically, others phonologically. Thus, you will see breaks of CAS*TOR versus CAST*ER; however, the pronunciations for both are kas't at r (@ for schwa). Exact hyphenation rules are largely similar (but not exact) amoung AHD, RHC, MW, and WNW. Likewise, exact pronunciations splits are largely similar (but not exactly the same) among the Big 4. There are oodles of words where the pronunciation split does not mirror the hyphenation split, duelign and boozer are examples of these. I still have a response to Thomas Paikeday's good question, but it will take me a little longer to write it out. --- Steve K. From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 18:42:02 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:42:02 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >>...In >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. > >Rima _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From RonButters at AOL.COM Tue Aug 8 18:49:28 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:49:28 EDT Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/2000 2:33:51 PM, stevek at SHORE.NET writes: << There's a difference between syllabication dots for hyphenation, and the break one puts in showing a pronunciation. This is true of MW, RHC, WNW, and AHD. >> thanks, steve, for the lesson in dictionary-making--very useful information i sure have been learning a lot these days from ads-l--including arnold zwicky's typing hints kinda "scary" how much I don't know From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 8 18:52:41 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:52:41 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: Just an elaboration, when it comes to hypenating words, there are actually three methods in place. (none of this has to do with pronunciations, but I thought it might be edifying, or at least interesting.) Certain affixes are strictly morphological, like -ing; the syllable dot will always precede it. (jok*ing, kill*ing) Other affixes are broken phonologically. Still other affixes are broken either phonologcally or morphologically, depending on whether the root they attach to is itself the semantically related word (or would be if you added an e to it). [Thus guid*ance, but fi*nance, broken that way in the Big 4.] (I figured this 'rule' out by analyzing all the words in AHD that ended in -ance, looking for patterns. It was confusing at first, until I realized that in some cases, semantics does come into play: guidance can be seen as guide + ance, whereas that's not the case with finance. This was corroborated by other words.) What's more, the decision of whether to break consonant clusters (like rt or nd) depends on the affix they're attached to. Again, these guidelines of how to break words are based largely on the conventions set forth by typographers. Random House, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage all show a similar pattern; Webster's New World hyphenation leans more toward the morphological (they're more inclined to keep clusters intact where the other 3 would split them). It's a fascinating thing, really. --- Steve K. From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Aug 8 18:55:43 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 14:55:43 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: Brokaw is widely made fun of (on Imus, etc.) for having great difficulty with medial L. In words like "dollar" (pretty common in the news) he says something like "DOW-er". It gets pretty funny when the medial Ls pile up, as in a word like "colloquially". I expect his copy editors avoid such words in preparing his material, and he probably cuts some himself in rehearsing. But once in a while you've gotta say "dollar" and other common L-full words in reading the news. I don't know the name for this phenomenon, but perhaps others do? Barbara Walters of ABC has a similar problem, but more with R I believe. You may recall how she was made fun of for it years ago by the late Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live, via the character "Baba Wawa". Frank Abate From rkm at SLIP.NET Tue Aug 8 20:59:37 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 13:59:37 -0700 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <24.8e38445.26c1a8c4@aol.com> Message-ID: >...It would seem to me very unnatural >to syllabify e.g., DUELING as DUE + LING, much less HOOTING as HOO + TING. >Does this mean that BOOZER is BOO + ZER? I'm sure Steve was referring to the pron field - not the boldfaced entry field for the syllabication. Of course the boldfaced entry would be syllabified by other rules - including root and affix, free forms, etc. The pron field will be syllabified by custom/style/individual dictionary editorial decisions, etc. As to Tom Paikaday's question re the oo for the sound of poo, again that's an editorial decision of the dictionary. Since American dictionaries tend not to use IPA symbols (for reasons discussed in previous threads), we try to be as orthographic in our pronunciation fields as possible. Some dictionaries use ? (u with an umlaut), some the oo with a macron. These obviously can be gotten into with much more detail - but this is a quick response. Rima From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 21:00:14 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:00:14 -0400 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the produce manager the price >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those muskmelons or the >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I asked her what the >difference was between the. She said that she thought they were the >same but that the produce department made a distinction between the >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, Indiana-grown melon >that has natural seams. > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific Armenian variety of >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at Cantelupo, near Rome. >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several different varieties. > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was taught, I'm not sure >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name for what was >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE Michigan also called >them all "mushmelon". > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms among people who are >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > >Herb Stahlke Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very question when I was visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always said 'muskmelon', but I think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I grew up and moved away, while he did not. Our sense is that they refer to the same fruit (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in southern Ohio differed, however. The older uses both terms (and hears 'mushmelon' among still older people, as I do here but did not in Minnesota), while the younger one only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the term 'muskmelon' at all (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a texture-based difference; that does indeed sound like a commercially made up distinction. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 8 21:16:06 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:16:06 -0400 Subject: Cam(pb)ell In-Reply-To: <398A4571.CE28E771@missouri.edu> Message-ID: At 11:24 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: >Back in 1958 when ZIP Codes first came in, I was living in a town of about >3000 in West >Texas (McCamey). A friend of mine was named Richmond Campbell, and most >of his friends >called him Rich. An acquaintance in Midland (where W is from, kind of) >sent him a note >and on the envelope drew a money bag and a camel and wrote 79752. A day or >so later, the >missive was placed in Richmond's PO box. >I think I usually, maybe always, say the -b- in Campbell, and maybe always >have, but I >can't think of the religious groups as anything other than "Camelites" >because that's the >way Texas members of the group would say the name, though I'd probably say >a slight -b- >unless I were consciously imitating the "Camelites." >DMLance > >Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > > > Arnold Zwicky writes: > > > > >>>>> > > extremely item-specific pronunciations are not unknown. ann > > daingerfield zwicky (and some of the people she grew up with in > > lexington, kentucky) had "Campbell" pronounced the same as "camel", > > while maintaining the [b] in "ramble", "Rambo", etc. she used this > > pronunciation for everyone named Campbell, whether or not they > > themselves used it. so it was "Camel's condensed soups", which > > always struck me as perverse. eventually one of her dearest friends > > married a man named Campbell-with-a-b, and she made an exception > > for bonnie and ed, her only ramble-Campbells. > > <<<<< Then there's my mother, who was such an extreme spelling-pronouncer that she'd pronounce the word [kaempbEl]. When she asked for Campbell's condensed soups in "the store," people did a double take. She also pronounced 'Louisville' with an [s] and 'Thomas' with theta--unless the latter name referred to someone she knew first orally rather than through writing. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 00:24:28 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 17:24:28 -0700 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000808143732.00c17800@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: >What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far >from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal >stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. I wasn't at all implying that it was a regional thing. I was implying that anyone getting paid a 7 figure salary (with no decimal points) to speak - should at least be able to pronounce all 26 letters. Rima From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Wed Aug 9 03:12:30 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 22:12:30 -0500 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar closure. Maybe this is what some perceive as a speech impediment. DMLance Beverly Flanigan wrote: > What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far > from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > > At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > >>...In > >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > > > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech impediment. > > > >Rima > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Aug 9 08:46:33 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 01:46:33 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: <200008090401.VAA19832@odo.U.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Sorry Rima, we don't "pronounce letters". Alphabetic representations of words may or may not have much historical connection with actual pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been pronounced (except perhaps by compulsive spelling-pronouncers like Beverly's mother). Letters don't have sounds: people do. Rudy From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 11:22:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 07:22:55 EDT Subject: Norway nibbles Message-ID: Greetings from Oslo, Norway. The people here are blonde because OSLO is an anagram for Anita LOOS (author of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES). OLSEN DRIVER (NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINKS)--Ginger ale, eplemost, lime, oldevann. PRINCE OF NORWAY (LONG DRINKS)--vodka, apricot brandy, sprite, lime. FRENCH DOG DRESSING (by BAHNCKE)--one place has this along with Hot Dog Dressing. What's the difference--one's for a French poodle? SCANDINAVIA CLUB SANDWICH--bacon, salad, chicken, tomatoes. LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. NACHIPS--Peppes Pizza term for Nacho Chips. From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 13:36:22 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:36:22 +0100 Subject: Pronouncing letters Message-ID: Rudolph C Troike wrote: > Alphabetic representations of > words may or may not have much historical connection with actual > pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been > pronounced The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic (ish) alphabet. I know /l/ has a strong tendency to become a vowel (as in my .signature: 'fa' in Scots is 'fall' (*not* autumn) in English). Was the introduced through spelling reformers? Was it pronounced before the Normans corssed the Channel? I'm genuinely curious as to how the the got into the past tense of our modals, particularly . I also will admit complete ignorance as to the history of the phonology of the modals or high, back vowels followed by . Apologies to the non-linguists. > Letters don't have sounds: people do. Is this linguists' response to the Second Amendment? :-) --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 13:41:39 2000 From: MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM (MAVINSON5 at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:41:39 EDT Subject: ADS-L Digest - 7 Aug 2000 to 8 Aug 2000 (#2000-222) Message-ID: My mother's friend from Henry Co. TN and Calloway Co., KY refuses to use the word cantaloupe and calls all mushmellon. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 13:54:39 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:54:39 +0100 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles Message-ID: > LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for that--plenty in the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. (I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) Lynne From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Wed Aug 9 14:55:46 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 10:55:46 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Sorry I missed the good clean water that flowed under the bridge while I was asleep. About the long and short of the "oo" sound, I would like to ask why umlauts and such diacritics on the one hand and symbols unprintable in Roman letters (as in IPA) should be imposed on the general public who are not taking courses in phonetics. Of course, this is not fair to teachers of phonetics - seems to question the reason for their existence. But talking about people who just want to decode pronunciations without learning to use totally new and abstract systems, diacritical, IPA, spelling-based, or what have you, are systems more important than the people they serve? For example, what's the earthly use of transcribing "stone" as (STOHN) or "rage" as (RAYJ) in a spelling-based system? Why not give dictionary users the benefit of the doubt, namely that they do read English at the "elementary level" (give or take a few years) and leave well enough alone? Back to the "poo-" sounds, if you take the more common headwords of a dictionary for the people, we have the following entries: poo, pooch, poodle, pooh, pooh-bah, pooh-pooh, pool, poop, poor, etc. The question is, which of these need transcription into an abstract system for the benefit of the English user who reads at the elementary level? Does a normal English speaker ever try to say any of those words with a short "oo"? How about getting a little more narrow and showing that the initial open "p" is aspirate in English? "Poor" may be neither long nor short, but isn't it an academic question to be tackled at the ESL starting level? In 1983-84, I field-tested an 85,000-entry dictionary using American high-school teachers from coast to coast and their students and the responses were near unanimous. Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do you define "system"? How you pronounce the word is (SIS.tum) in my book, in case anyone wondered if it was (SICE.tum). I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). In other dictionaries it is: (a) (sis[primary stress].t[schwa]m) in most diacritical systems; (b) ([primary stress]s[dotless "i"]s.t[schwa]m), as in IPA; (c) (sis[boldfaced][hyphen instead of dot or space]t["e" carrying a breve mark]m), as in Oxford American Dictionary. I object to the use of breve "e" on phonetic grounds. I think unstressed "u+consonant" is more correct than "breve e+consonant" if you look at English spelling patterns. Thanks for your expert reactions. Tom Paikeday ========================= THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's? Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 9 15:04:34 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 11:04:34 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: Rima McKinzey writes: >>>>> I wasn't at all implying that it was a regional thing. I was implying that anyone getting paid a 7 figure salary (with no decimal points) to speak - should at least be able to pronounce all 26 letters. <<<<< As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? TouGH! (Sorry... but not very ;-)\ ) -- Mark (Completions and improvements are welcome!) Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From stevek at SHORE.NET Wed Aug 9 15:18:29 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 11:18:29 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in In-Reply-To: <399170F1.A68F332D@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: My main problem with some of the eye-spelling approach to pronunciations is that single characters are used to represent more than one sound. Whereas you can use an i-macron and an i-breve to distinguish between the i of like and the i of pit, in most eye-spelling systems you have to rely on some type of convention -- usually a 'silent' e after a consonant that follows a long vowel, or a doubling the consonant that follows the short vowel. What's worse, if a syllable is itself a word, sometimes you'll see 'nut' represented as NUT but a syllable that's 'dut', since dut is not not a word, you'll see represented as DUTT. There are certain words that become incomprehensible when using some type of new system spelling. I've seen 'ice' represented as EYESS, for example. What's worse, for the ESL market, representing vowel length by means of following doubled consonants or silent e is not a wise choice when in so many languages, final e is pronunced. In one analysis I did of children's dictionaries, some use the same pronunciation symbol in 2, sometimes 3 different ways. o-breve is o-breve. Using 'o' to cover both o-breve and o-macron isn't helpful when you're requiring other clues (doubled consonants, silent e) to be the item that determines its length. People may say they want keyless pronunciations, but people also told McDonalds that they wanted lower-fat, vegetarian options, and when those were trotted out, they failed miserably. The phonemic systems employed by the American Big 4 work well for native speakers of English. I agree that other systems are necessary for ESL speakers, but the above concerns with regard to silent e and consonant doubling should be taken into account. As far as general American dictionaries are concerned, if it ain't broke, dont' fix it. It's simple to grasp that i-breve is the i sound of pit, and once you've got that down, you don't have to try to second guess the conventions of an eye-pron system. --- Steve K. From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 9 15:52:01 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 08:52:01 -0700 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: My understanding of the difference, for what its worth, is that the New World variety is muskmelon and the Old World variety is canteloupe, but most North Americans call a muskmelon a canteloupe because of the dominant influence of Old World culture in N. America and because the two varieties are basically the same in the eyes of us common folk. This has just been picked up in bits and pieces through the years, no single source. Someone at Burpee or another seed supplier might provide enlightenment, if any of you have a contact with such a person. --- Beverly Flanigan wrote: > At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: > >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the > produce manager the price > >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those > muskmelons or the > >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I > asked her what the > >difference was between the. She said that she > thought they were the > >same but that the produce department made a > distinction between the > >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, > Indiana-grown melon > >that has natural seams. > > > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific > Armenian variety of > >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at > Cantelupo, near Rome. > >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several > different varieties. > > > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was > taught, I'm not sure > >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name > for what was > >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE > Michigan also called > >them all "mushmelon". > > > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms > among people who are > >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > > > >Herb Stahlke > > Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very > question when I was > visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always > said 'muskmelon', but I > think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I > grew up and moved > away, while he did not. Our sense is that they > refer to the same fruit > (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in > southern Ohio differed, > however. The older uses both terms (and hears > 'mushmelon' among still > older people, as I do here but did not in > Minnesota), while the younger one > only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the > term 'muskmelon' at all > (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a > texture-based > difference; that does indeed sound like a > commercially made up distinction. > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of > Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH > 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 9 16:26:54 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:26:54 -0700 Subject: Cantaloupe and muskmelon Message-ID: I just followed some of my own advice, went to the Burpee Webpage, and searched for both muskmelon and cantaloupe. http://www.burpee.com/ Both muskmelons and cantaloupes are listed, and sometimes both words are used in describing a particular melon, but one variety is marked... "Vedrantais Heirloom Melon HEIRLOOM.Charentais-type melons are the real cantaloupes, born in Italy and refined in France. $2.95" Based on the small picture, they have a smooth skin, no evident veining, and look nothing like the cantaloupe sold in local stores. The color is yellow with dark green stripes running from bud to stem. It's hard to judge accurately from the picture, but they also appear to be smaller than a typical "cantaloupe". --- Beverly Flanigan wrote: > At 01:12 PM 8/3/00 -0500, you wrote: > >Yesterday while grocery shopping I asked the > produce manager the price > >of cantaloupe. She responded, "Do you mean those > muskmelons or the > >cantaloupe over there?" After I got the price, I > asked her what the > >difference was between the. She said that she > thought they were the > >same but that the produce department made a > distinction between the > >smaller rough-skinned cantaloupe and the larger, > Indiana-grown melon > >that has natural seams. > > > >The RHD distinguishes cantaloupe as the specific > Armenian variety of > >Cucumis Melo first grown at the papal estate at > Cantelupo, near Rome. > >Muskmelons are also Cucumis Melo, but several > different varieties. > > > >As a child, I got the impression, or perhaps was > taught, I'm not sure > >which, that cantaloupe was a formal, "proper" name > for what was > >colloquially called muskmelon. Some people in SE > Michigan also called > >them all "mushmelon". > > > >What distinctions do you find between the two terms > among people who are > >not produce managers, gardeners, or botanists? > > > >Herb Stahlke > > Funny you should ask--my brother asked me this very > question when I was > visiting in Minnesota last week. As kids we always > said 'muskmelon', but I > think I felt the "proper" term was 'cantaloupe' as I > grew up and moved > away, while he did not. Our sense is that they > refer to the same fruit > (vegetable?). The two dept. secretaries here in > southern Ohio differed, > however. The older uses both terms (and hears > 'mushmelon' among still > older people, as I do here but did not in > Minnesota), while the younger one > only uses 'cantaloupe' and claims not to know the > term 'muskmelon' at all > (a dubious claim, I suspect). I've never heard of a > texture-based > difference; that does indeed sound like a > commercially made up distinction. > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of > Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH > 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 16:04:41 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 12:04:41 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) Message-ID: Steve K said: >> My main problem with some of the eye-spelling approach to pronunciations is that single characters are used to represent more than one sound. Whereas you can use an i-macron and an i-breve to distinguish between the i of like and the i of pit, in most eye-spelling systems you have to rely on some type of convention -- usually a 'silent' e after a consonant that follows a long vowel, or a doubling the consonant that follows the short vowel. What's worse, if a syllable is itself a word, sometimes you'll see 'nut' represented as NUT but a syllable that's 'dut', since dut is not not a word, you'll see represented as DUTT. There are certain words that become incomprehensible when using some type of new system spelling. I've seen 'ice' represented as EYESS, for example. What's worse, for the ESL market, representing vowel length by means of following doubled consonants or silent e is not a wise choice when in so many languages, final e is pronunced. In one analysis I did of children's dictionaries, some use the same pronunciation symbol in 2, sometimes 3 different ways. o-breve is o-breve. Using 'o' to cover both o-breve and o-macron isn't helpful when you're requiring other clues (doubled consonants, silent e) to be the item that determines its length. People may say they want keyless pronunciations, but people also told McDonalds that they wanted lower-fat, vegetarian options, and when those were trotted out, they failed miserably. The phonemic systems employed by the American Big 4 work well for native speakers of English. I agree that other systems are necessary for ESL speakers, but the above concerns with regard to silent e and consonant doubling should be taken into account. As far as general American dictionaries are concerned, if it ain't broke, dont' fix it. It's simple to grasp that i-breve is the i sound of pit, and once you've got that down, you don't have to try to second guess the conventions of an eye-pron system. << ************* While I don't dispute the truth in some of Steve's points and criticisms, I must add that, in informal surveys of non-specialist, non-linguist, non-editor users, we have found that many just ignore the prons in the general dictionaries, largely because they can't make out what the prons are trying to say/show. There are many, esp. older dict users, who are totally put off by schwa. Many schools are now teaching schwa, so the problem may be lessening among younger users. In my own immediate family the dict-style prons I have shown them as a test are regularly misinterpreted. The problem is in ignoring the pron key. No one wants to look at a pron key, anymore than normal users of dicts EVER read the introductory matter to see what the lexicographers were intending to do. I don't know if you can attribute all this to general human laziness or what, but the point is that users DON'T do it, and you can't make them, and one certainly shouldn't assume that they do or will. So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke . . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check spelling and meaning. I for one would love to see a keyless SYSTEM implemented in any major American dict. I think it would be a step toward better understanding, and wider use of the prons. Tom Paikeday has developed a pretty good one in his "User's Webster Dictionary", and it deserves serious consideration by pronunciation editors and linguists. btw, I am ardently part of the anti-IPA school when it comes to general dicts. It's OK for ESL dicts, totally useless, if not damaging, in general dicts. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Wed Aug 9 14:43:51 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 09:43:51 -0500 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lefses are super thin potato pancakes. They are also good slathered with butter. By all means avoid lutefisk in white sauce, but try it mixed with forked-mashed potatoes and butter. Bob Wachal At 02:54 PM 8/9/00 +0100, you wrote: >> LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. > >It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for that--plenty in >the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. > >(I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) > >Lynne > > From stevek at SHORE.NET Wed Aug 9 16:47:01 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 12:47:01 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) In-Reply-To: <200008091606.MAA37176@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > > So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke >. . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the > prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look > up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check >spelling and meaning. In the instances where people do go to a dictionary to specifically look up a pronunciation, would you hazard a guess as to whether they would then use the pron key, particularly if the pron key is printed on every spread? In the AHD, it's out in the column and noticeable, so the user doesn't have to go far to use it. -- Steve K. From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 17:02:44 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:02:44 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > > So I take issue, in this instance, with Steve's "if it ain't broke >. . ." statement. I believe that most dict users just ignore the > prons. Moreover, I believe that most users rarely go to a dict to look > up a pron. The great, great majority of "look-ups" are to check >spelling and meaning. Steve K. replied: In the instances where people do go to a dictionary to specifically look up a pronunciation, would you hazard a guess as to whether they would then use the pron key, particularly if the pron key is printed on every spread? In the AHD, it's out in the column and noticeable, so the user doesn't have to go far to use it. *********** Steve: For those times a dict user DOES go to look up a pron (a tiny minority of overall dict look-ups, I contend), sure, they might look to the pron key, if it's handy, as on every spread, as it has been in most of the top Amer dicts. But even these curious folks might have trouble with a key. We'd have to ask in a survey. But, note that the new Web New World 4th ed. (1999) now has no pron key in the text, just a note sending users to the front matter. The WNW folks have decided that the space for more entries is more valuable than the pron key being printed 750 or so times. I think they made a sound decision. We (that is, dict editors) need a sizable survey of real users to determine how dicts are actually used, and for what purposes people turn to them, and how satisfied they are after use. I have only my personal observations and intuition to go on. Could ADS sponsor a survey of dictionary users? Sent by email (no mailing cost)? I'll be happy to draft one, if there is some assurance that it will be sent and the responses compiled, for general use, no restrictions. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From RonButters at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 17:32:28 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:32:28 EDT Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical "sponsor." My chief questions (speaking as a member of the ADS Executive Committee) are as follows: 1. What lists would the survey be sent to? How could we ensure that it would be a valid sampling of users? 2. Who would do the actual work of accumulating e-mail addresses and compiling the results? 3. How could we insure that the data then became available without restrictions? 4. What would it really mean to "sponsor" such a survey? The more I think about it (and I am just thinking about this off the top of my head right now) this sounds like an excellent research project for some academic who simply wants to do such a survey as a part of their normal research--results could then be published in DICTIONARIES (or even AMERICAN SPEECH). If some ADS member wants to make a proposal to the ADS Executive Committee, they should do so by writing to the ADS Executive Secretary, Allan Metcalf, at . Probably would be a good idea to explore the idea with Allan before making a formal proposal. In a message dated 8/9/2000 1:15:06 PM, fabate at BLR.COM writes: << Could ADS sponsor a survey of dictionary users? Sent by email (no mailing cost)? I'll be happy to draft one, if there is some assurance that it will be sent and the responses compiled, for general use, no restrictions.>> From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 17:45:51 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 18:45:51 +0100 Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: Ron Butters said: > I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical > "sponsor." Another idea would be to get a publisher to sponsor it. Publishers have money, scholarly organizations tend not to. Then perhaps the project could be funded and/or could make use of the publisher's staff for compiling the results. One problem with this would be the proprietary 'rights' of the publisher regarding the information collected. So, another option would be to ask for DSNA 'sponsorship' of the project (say, as a DSNA taskforce on pronunciation) and then ask a bunch of publishers to underwrite it, so that the money comes in but the information stays public. While it was claimed that this could be done for 'free', it seems like a lot of labor, which isn't really free... Lynne From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Wed Aug 9 17:40:58 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <3990CC15.E30EDEE9@missouri.edu> Message-ID: Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: >He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar >closure. Maybe this is >what some perceive as a speech impediment. >DMLance > >Beverly Flanigan wrote: > > > What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far > > from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > > stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > > > > At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > > >>...In > > >>the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > > > > > >Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech > impediment. > > > > > >Rima > > > > _____________________________________________ > > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 9 17:47:49 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:47:49 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in (prons in dicts) In-Reply-To: <200008091704.NAA41990@listserv.cc.uga.edu> from "Frank Abate" at Aug 09, 2000 01:02:44 PM Message-ID: > But, note that the new Web New World 4th ed. (1999) now has no pron > key in the text, just a note sending users to the front matter. The > WNW folks have decided that the space for more entries is more > valuable than the pron key being printed 750 or so times. I think > they made a sound decision. Random House made such a decision in 1997 or 1998 or so, by the way. Jesse Sheidlower OED From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Wed Aug 9 17:48:29 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:48:29 -0400 Subject: lefse was:Norway nibbles In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000809094351.007c1480@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: I agree with both comments! As a Minnesotan who grew up eating lutefisk and lefse, especially at Christmas, I can say lefse is wonderful--more of a pancake than a crepe, and generally cooked so that brown freckles appear all over the potato cake, which is 8-10 inches in diameter, spread with butter and maybe sugar, and rolled up to eat with fingers. Flour dough can be used, but mashed potatoes are better. And pour melted butter over the lutefisk, which is cod preserved in lye (yes!); it's rinsed several times to remove the lye, then poached in cheesecloth and eaten--a bit rubbery, and definitely an acquired taste. Most of my family will no longer touch the stuff. At 09:43 AM 8/9/00 -0500, you wrote: >Lefses are super thin potato pancakes. They are also good slathered with >butter. > >By all means avoid lutefisk in white sauce, but try it mixed with >forked-mashed potatoes and butter. > >Bob Wachal > >At 02:54 PM 8/9/00 +0100, you wrote: > >> LEFSE--haven't tried this yet, whatever it is. > > > >It's a kind of Norwegian crepe-like thing. Don't need to go to Norway for >that--plenty in > >the Upper Midwest! Eat it with lingonberry jam. > > > >(I recommend avoiding the lutefisk. Do all Norwegian foods start with L?) > > > >Lynne > > > > _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Wed Aug 9 18:11:54 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:11:54 -0400 Subject: ADS-sponsored survey Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: <> I'm all for finding out more about how people use dictionaries and the difficulties they have, and I'm all for making dictionaries as user-friendly as we can. But I am skeptical of Frank's notion of basing a dictionary on how most users use the dictionary most of the time. Consider the logic: If people almost never use the dictionary for pronunciations anyway, what's the point in including them? What's the point in going through the trouble of changing the pronunciation system to another one that has its own rules and transformations? Will people be more likely to read the pronunciations under a "newspaper" style system if they didn't under a conventional treatement? will they be able to disentangle the ambiguities? does it matter? It doesn't seem to bother the editors of our newspapers. To the bigger questions: If we are basing the structure and content of the dictionary on the relative frequency with which people look up specific parts of it, why should we include function words and basic verbs and all sorts of other things that most people do not bother to look at, since they "know" them already? An education researcher once objected to me that children really didn't need to wade through all those basic words like do and of. Kids really needed a streamlined dictionary that contained just what they needed know. In other words, I told her, she wanted a children's dictionary that did not have the easy words or the really hard adult words, but just the words that were pretty hard. How were we supposed to identify those pretty hard words? pretty hard for who? pretty hard for what situation? The problem always boils down to education. A dictionary is after all a very sophisticated research tool that compresses a lot of information about words into a very tiny space and requires lots of mental maneuvering (much of which eventually becomes automatic to verbal sophisticates) to yield productive knowledge. How thoroughly should dictionary makers expect the education system to teach students the conventions of the dictionary entry? Dictionary skills have come and gone like many other educational fads. The alternative is to try to make dictionaries more user-friendly in their structure and content. Efforts to make dictionaries more user-friendly inevitably require more space (as in the discursive style of defining that is common to kids' dictionaries: "To rob means to take something away from someone.") But when you add more text, you require more reading, and this itself has pedagogical limitations, since it makes no sense to write discursive definitions (or add grammatical information, etc.), if readers are turned off by too much text, and stop reading after the first two lines of an entry. And this leads to inevitable discussions about what is dispensable in order to accommodate the more discursive treatment. I'm not dismissing Frank's ideas. I'm just saying that this is a very complicated matter that does not have an easy solution, and that this may be why dictionary makers have stuck to their conventional treatment of pronunciation and many other things. It's the devil you know. Joe Pickett From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 18:38:51 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:38:51 -0400 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: Further to Ron and Lynne's comments on a survey of dict users: Ron Butters said: >>I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical "sponsor." My chief questions (speaking as a member of the ADS Executive Committee) are as follows: 1. What lists would the survey be sent to? How could we ensure that it would be a valid sampling of users? 2. Who would do the actual work of accumulating e-mail addresses and compiling the results? 3. How could we insure that the data then became available without restrictions? 4. What would it really mean to "sponsor" such a survey? << F Abate in reply: DSNA is a more logical sponsor, but it would be best to have ADS involved, too, as it is a larger group and has important expertise to add that DSNA may not have. 1. We need research done ($) to determine and buy ($$) the best lists. Validity should be shown by standard statistical methods. A survey company would have this expertise ($$$). 2. Survey company ($$$), or a team of grad students under an academician ($$), following a written procedure. 3. Sponsoring ($$$) must be with no strings, per a contract. If you want the full results, you gotta ante up, and then you can use the data as you please. 4. The survey would be under the aegis of ADS and DSNA, with (paying) corporate/publisher sponsors (Lynne M's idea). Ron B continues: >> The more I think about it (and I am just thinking about this off the top of my head right now) this sounds like an excellent research project for some academic who simply wants to do such a survey as a part of their normal research--results could then be published in DICTIONARIES (or even AMERICAN SPEECH). If some ADS member wants to make a proposal to the ADS Executive Committee, they should do so by writing to the ADS Executive Secretary, Allan Metcalf, at . Probably would be a good idea to explore the idea with Allan before making a formal proposal. << **************** from Lynne's email: >> Ron Butters said: > I think this is an excellent idea, though DSNA would be an even more logical > "sponsor." Another idea would be to get a publisher to sponsor it. Publishers have money, scholarly organizations tend not to. Then perhaps the project could be funded and/or could make use of the publisher's staff for compiling the results. One problem with this would be the proprietary 'rights' of the publisher regarding the information collected. So, another option would be to ask for DSNA 'sponsorship' of the project (say, as a DSNA taskforce on pronunciation) and then ask a bunch of publishers to underwrite it, so that the money comes in but the information stays public. While it was claimed that this could be done for 'free', it seems like a lot of labor, which isn't really free... Lynne << Frank A in reply: Asking publishers is a great idea. As with the Amer Natl Corpus effort, if there are several involved, no ONE can claim ownership. That would be a contractual condition of the sponsorship agreement they would sign. It will not be free, but costs could be determined up front, and a budget circulated, so sponsors could see what they're paying for. ADS and DSNA would provide technical guidance and "sanction" the validity of the survey. I expect that lowest cost would be in an academic setting with a faculty person suprevising a team of students. But their methodology has to be set in advance, blessed by the ADS and DSNA, and then they must follow it, to ensure statistical validity. My offer to draft the questionnaire stands. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 9 19:06:00 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 20:06:00 +0100 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: > My offer to draft the questionnaire stands. > > Frank Abate I'm not sure who you're making this offer to... I think, if you're interested in taking on this project and are interested in getting the project sponsored/funded, then you (or someone) needs to draw up a proposal to take to DSNA or ADS and whatever funding sources. That might involve a draft Qnaire, which might benefit from review by others. But even though the project might be 'sponsored' by an organization, it would need an individual to be its PI (principal investigator) and get credit for the ideas and any publications that came out of it. The worst part about writing proposals is that they usually take as much work as writing an article, and you don't get to put the proposal on your CV! Lynne, who wants a Pulitzer prize category for proposals, applications, and nominations From fabate at BLR.COM Wed Aug 9 18:54:48 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 14:54:48 -0400 Subject: dict user survey Message-ID: Joe Pickett said: >> I'm all for finding out more about how people use dictionaries and the difficulties they have, and I'm all for making dictionaries as user-friendly as we can. But I am skeptical of Frank's notion of basing a dictionary on how most users use the dictionary most of the time. << I would be skeptical too, Joe. I don't mean that we should BASE a dict--style, scope, format, etc.--on what a survey says, but merely that a sound survey would allow us to set priorities better, without relying solely on intuition and tradition. If we find that most users don't use the prons because they can't interpret them, then it behooves the dict editors to change the pron style. On the other hand, we may learn that they in fact use them all the time, and largely without trouble (which I very much doubt, but let the survey guide us). Also, a survey may inform us on the ways to order or present other elements of entries. People (but what percentage?) seem to like word histories, but what percentage can interpret the very abbreviated style of etymologies seen in several dicts? Perhaps the algebraic-looking, abbreviation-laden etyms are a waste for most users? Who really knows? I'd like to know what the "typical" user prefers, based on solid numbers. Different editors and publishers could interpret and implement policies based on that data any way they choose. Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services phone: (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 email: abatefr at earthlink.net From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Wed Aug 9 19:00:32 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:00:32 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000809133333.0169e180@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: You know, I find Brokaw damned entertaining, and that's because of his eccentric speech. (Since I enjoy it, I won't call it a speech impediment.) He's a fair journalist, and a good bit easier to take than Baba Wawa. But in defense of even that over-inflated idiot, I still enjoy hearing diversity on the radio or television. Just because they're network anchors doesn't mean that they should speak some flawless "standard" English. And how's about Rather? His speech may be fairly "correct" (oh my god, look at all the scare quotes), but his delivery is more wooden than the collected members of the Sequoia National Forest. The best American English you'll hear on a network newscast is from Peter Jennings, a Canadian. I think it's all part of some kinda plot. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was > mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal > stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's > minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a > Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. > > At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: >> He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar >> closure. Maybe this is >> what some perceive as a speech impediment. >> DMLance >> >> Beverly Flanigan wrote: >> >>> What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, not far >>> from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal >>> stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. >>> >>> At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: >>>>> ...In >>>>> the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. >>>> >>>> Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech >> impediment. >>>> >>>> Rima >>> >>> _____________________________________________ >>> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >>> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >>> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >>> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 9 19:49:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:49:15 EDT Subject: Fwd: "Coffee Break" in a union contract Message-ID: This internet place in Oslo offers "Quiche a la Hotmail." I don't know what's in it--probably spam instead of bacon. I was told that "coffee break" was in union contracts from the 1940s, but I guess I was misinformed. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Carrolyn A. Davis" Subject: "Coffee Break" in a union contract Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 10:41:49 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2714 URL: From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 9 21:20:56 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 17:20:56 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: I recall my father having talked much about the organization of the ACD being based in part on a survey done in college classrooms. I don't know if I can find a copy. If I do, it might be helpful in constructing a new survey. Indeed, I believe a survey should be undertaken. Perhaps two surveys: (1) the old-fashioned kind where the responses can be somewhat more controlled than one done on the Internet, and (2) an e-mail survey which might be targeted at more than one market (one for teachers, one for students, one for "pop" critics). I think that perhaps a committee of five should be selected (2 from ADS; 2 from DSNA; and coordinator). Funding could be solicited from the major North American dictionary publishers of college dictionaries. Another, more scholarly approach would be to solicit the support (and or advice) of the ACLS. Other sources might include MLA, NCTE, and the like. Regards, DKB David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR Wed Aug 9 18:10:52 2000 From: JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR (JIM.WALKER) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 20:10:52 +0200 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already there? Jim From faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU Wed Aug 9 22:28:46 2000 From: faber at POP.HASKINS.YALE.EDU (Alice Faber) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 18:28:46 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 5:20 PM -0400 8/9/2000, Barnhart wrote, ostensibly about CLB's dictionary survey: >I recall my father having talked much about the organization of the ACD >being based in part on a survey done in college classrooms. I don't >know if I can find a copy. If I do, it might be helpful in >constructing a new survey. > >Indeed, I believe a survey should be undertaken. Perhaps two surveys: >(1) the old-fashioned kind where the responses can be somewhat more >controlled than one done on the Internet, and (2) an e-mail survey >which might be targeted at more than one market (one for teachers, one >for students, one for "pop" critics). > >I think that perhaps a committee of five should be selected (2 from >ADS; 2 from DSNA; and coordinator). Funding could be solicited from >the major North American dictionary publishers of college dictionaries. > Another, more scholarly approach would be to solicit the support (and >or advice) of the ACLS. Other sources might include MLA, NCTE, and >the like. > I think one has to be very careful about relying too heavily on an email survey, for several reasons. One is that email users are not necessarily representative of dictionary users in general. Another is that any properly random email survey would be treated like spam by a large number of recipients. To do it electronically, I'd do it off of the ADS (or some other) web site, with announcements in various places (sci.lang, alt.usage.english, etc), though even that runs the risk of being treated as spam. -- Alice Faber tel. (203) 865-6163 Haskins Laboratories fax (203) 865-8963 270 Crown St new improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu New Haven, CT 06511 old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 22:43:47 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:43:47 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Sorry Rima, we don't "pronounce letters". ... Aw, c'mon you guys - mine was a glib (but funny, I thought) statement. Should I have instead written something like, Well,in my humble opinion, a professional speaker of English should be able to pronounce all phonemic sounds in at least one of the more-or-less standardized allomorphs? It just happens that Tom Brokaw's particular brand of pronunciation is particularly difficult for me to listen to, and so I try to avoid him. Rima From rkm at SLIP.NET Wed Aug 9 22:43:47 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 15:43:47 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't really remember all of them just now. Rima From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Thu Aug 10 01:47:05 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:47:05 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Good question! I did think about this when revising what I had written, but decided not to be too Jesuitic after spending 11 years in bed with them. Thanks anyway, Jim. TOM. P.S. My friend didn't know he was in Reading - a question of being and knowing, I suppose. =================================================== "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Thu Aug 10 01:54:19 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:54:19 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Good question! I did think about this when revising what I had written, but decided not to be too Jesuitic after spending 11 years in bed with them. On the positive side, I am happy about the initiatives being taken by Frank Abate and Ron Butters in the fact-finding direction. Thanks, Jim. TOM. P.S. My friend didn't know he was in Reading - a question of being and knowing, I suppose. =================================================== "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim "JIM.WALKER" wrote: > >I am reminded of my friend who got lost in Reading, England. > >He was asking for directions to (REE.ding). > > Sorry to be picky, but why was he asking for directions if he was already > there? > > Jim From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 10 02:44:47 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:44:47 -0500 Subject: Hyphenation In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Would that it were so. I have seen some much BAD hyphenation in the newspapers and books (even Harry Potter!), with biking, for example, hyphenated between just about any two letters, or don't hyphenated between the o and the n. This is clearly a fourth method (hit-or-miss!). Barbara Need Uchicago--Linguistics >Just an elaboration, when it comes to hypenating words, there are actually >three methods in place. (none of this has to do with pronunciations, but I >thought it might be edifying, or at least interesting.) > >Certain affixes are strictly morphological, like -ing; the syllable dot >will always precede it. (jok*ing, kill*ing) > >Other affixes are broken phonologically. > >Still other affixes are broken either phonologcally or morphologically, >depending on whether the root they attach to is itself the semantically >related word (or would be if you added an e to it). [Thus guid*ance, but >fi*nance, broken that way in the Big 4.] (I figured this 'rule' out by >analyzing all the words in AHD that ended in -ance, looking for >patterns. It was confusing at first, until I realized that in some >cases, semantics does come into play: guidance can be seen as >guide + ance, whereas that's not the case with finance. This was >corroborated by other words.) What's more, the decision of whether to >break consonant clusters (like rt or nd) depends on the affix they're >attached to. Again, these guidelines of how to break words are based >largely on the conventions set forth by typographers. > >Random House, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage all show a similar >pattern; Webster's New World hyphenation leans more toward the >morphological (they're more inclined to keep clusters intact where the >other 3 would split them). > >It's a fascinating thing, really. > >--- Steve K. From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 10 02:42:47 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 21:42:47 -0500 Subject: Pronouncing letters In-Reply-To: <39915E56.78BE0113@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: >Rudolph C Troike wrote: > >> Alphabetic representations of >> words may or may not have much historical connection with actual >> pronunciations (such as the in , which has never been >> pronounced > >The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic >(ish) alphabet. I know /l/ has a strong tendency to become a vowel (as >in my .signature: 'fa' in Scots is 'fall' (*not* autumn) in English). >Was the introduced through spelling reformers? Was it pronounced >before the Normans corssed the Channel? I'm genuinely curious as to how >the the got into the past tense of our modals, particularly >. I also will admit complete ignorance as to the history of the >phonology of the modals or high, back vowels followed by . > No, the in _could_ was not pronounced, because the in that word doesn't belong there: it has come into the word from _would_ and _should_. My guess is is after /l/ in those words was no longer pronounced (perhaps an early velarization of /l/) and then the words sounded alike. _could_ is from OE _cuD_ (the D is an edh, so, ModE couth). Obviously, there was also a change in teh pronuniciation of the final sound. Barbara Need UChicago--Linguistics From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 12:25:41 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:25:41 +0100 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Thinking more about dictionary surveys... I've read various studies based on surveys, and I have to admit that when I read them, I doubt their usefulness. (They're better than nothing, but...) If someone asked me what I do when I use a dictionary, I doubt that what I remembered doing would be the same as what I actually do. For instance, if you asked me if I use the dictionary for pronunciations never/occasionally/sometimes/often, I'd really be doing no better than guessing, I think. I'd be more interested in either tracking actual use or controlled-observation studies. Tracking could consist of having a set of volunteers (perhaps households) keep a record of when/why/how they use a dictionary over the course of, say, a year. They could, for instance, be given a worksheet to keep with their dictionary, in which they note the date, the word, what part of the entry they were looking for (definition, pronunciation),how satisfactory they found the information and how easily they found it on a scale of 1-5. Am I making this up, or did someone already do a study like this that is creeping out from my subconscious? Controlled observation would involve setting a task for volunteers and watching how they achieve the goal. So, for example, have the volunteers look up a word to see how to pronounce it. One way of achieving this would be to videotape the process, possibly having the volunteer 'think aloud' about what they are doing. If someone were interested in a collaborative project like one of those, I would probably be interested in participating. I'd be particularly interested in tracking dictionary use in classrooms... Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 12:29:07 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:29:07 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't > really remember all of them just now. > > Rima Well, is the Q in 'acquire' silent, or is it the C? (Or is someone going to tell me there's a geminate /k/ there?) Lynne From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Thu Aug 10 14:41:46 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:41:46 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Lynne, your thoughts are very good. I'd like to work on some form of tracking. I think a classroom or library setting is more likely to be useful than home studies. Perhaps a collaborative effort by ADS, DSNA, Euralex, and the American Library Association (and Britisth Library Association) would be fundable. College classrooms are the obvious place. However, high school libraries might be useful, too. Perhaps we could do something through the Dictionary Companion. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 10 14:17:24 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 07:17:24 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: The"o" in "iron" is silent?? --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: > >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", > "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", > >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", > "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", > >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? > > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with > a silent letter > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for > q? I don't > really remember all of them just now. > > Rima ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 14:24:02 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:24:02 +0100 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: > From: Barnhart at highlands.com (Barnhart)> > Lynne, your thoughts are very good. I'd like to work on some form of > tracking. I think a classroom or library setting is more likely to be > useful than home studies. Perhaps a collaborative effort by ADS, DSNA, > Euralex, and the American Library Association (and Britisth Library > Association) would be fundable. College classrooms are the obvious > place. However, high school libraries might be useful, too. Perhaps > we could do something through the Dictionary Companion. Libraries are a good idea--school libraries would be most manageable, since they have a limited clientele, and so it would be easy to instruct people to fill out the forms. I don't think dictionaries are used all that much in college classrooms--I've always required that students buy a dictionary, but not that they lug it to class, and no classrooms I've taught in have a dictionary in situ. If we did school classrooms, perhaps it could be done within a few school districts across a number of grades. Of course, if I'm involved it does bring up the transatlantic question, but since I'm on the DSNA schools taskforce, I don't see any reason not to focus at this point on the US (if it's a schools survey), and then do a second study in the UK. Seems like it would be easier to keep things in one country at a time. So, I see a number of possible tracking studies here: - cross-grade within schools (classrooms and libraries) - college-level (send students home with worksheets, and possibly also do libraries; would be tracking a number of individuals through a semester or year) - public libraries (tracks what the dictionaries are used for, but not what individual variation there is in dictionary use) - household use? (Nielsen families for dictionaries?) More variables: - what country/ies (US first, UK next?) - what dictionaries (e.g., would all schools in the study have the same dictionary series, or would we try for equal numbers of different series? I vote for many different--try to get underwriting from the different publishers) - what about electronic dictionaries? do we also need to track these to see to what degree they are displacing print dictionaries, and whether some dictionary-uses are favored for print vs electronic? More funding thoughts: - state and federal education departments; this might be the kind of thing that one could get a big govt grant for (if it's a school study, that is). - from publishers: maybe one way to get school participation would be to get that school dictionary upgrades; or a way to get individual participation would be to 'pay' them with reference books (earn a thesaurus by using the dictionary!). Has a study like this been done for learner dictionaries? I'm thinking that there's probably been a lot done by the ESL dictionary makers (esp in UK). Such things might provide models. I might've seen something like this in the Longman dictionary newsletter-journal thing. So much more fun to work on a future project than a present one. Back to writing. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From kelly at BARD.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:07:53 2000 From: kelly at BARD.EDU (Robert Kelly) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:07:53 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <20000810141724.28531.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o' On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, James Smith wrote: > The"o" in "iron" is silent?? > > --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: > > >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", > > "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", > > >, , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", > > "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", > > >"cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? > > > > A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with > > a silent letter > > for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for > > q? I don't > > really remember all of them just now. > > > > Rima > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. > http://invites.yahoo.com/ > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 10 14:17:11 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:17:11 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday writes: >>>>> Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do you define "system"? <<<<< You have hit the nail on the head. English spelling is so chaotic and context-dependent that any phonological "system" based on it must fail, as the users either - take more material as context than the system intended, or less - blow off reading the definition of context - throw up their hands at added symbols intended to define context "self-evidently" - encounter a foreign or "green card" word whose pronunciation defies their expectations (The example I remember of the last one, perhaps from _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ [or was it vice versa?], was "Skoplje". Can anyone give this a clear keyless pron for Americans?!) A senior co-worker once objected to the symbols I was establishing for the phonemes of American English: "Surely you can make them clearer so they'll be obvious to any native speaker." "No, I can't," I replied, "and if you think you can, you're welcome to try." "Well, no, I don't have the time or the knowledge. That's your department. But surely they don't have to need a key!" "I've tried and I've tried. It's inherent in English spelling, and it's like the pile of dirt under the rug. Any time you make something clearer in one place you end up making something else more obscure. This is the best I can do, and I daresay close to the best anyone can do." I don't know if he ever believed me, but I had the last word. As he said, it was my department. Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:44:28 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:44:28 -0500 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: The stigmatized South Midland pronunciation rhymes with their 'barn' and the less stigmatized pronunciation rhymes with Inland Northerners' pronunciation of 'barn'. DMLance Robert Kelly wrote: > I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though > a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not > pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not > pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o'. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 14:42:21 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:42:21 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <20000810141724.28531.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > From: James Smith > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 07:17:24 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > > The"o" in "iron" is silent?? > > --- Kim & Rima McKinzey wrote: >>> As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", >> "bellE", , "Gnash", "Honest", >>> , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", >> "Pseudo", , , , "busTle", >>> "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? >> >> A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with >> a silent letter >> for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for >> q? I don't >> really remember all of them just now. >> >> Rima > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. > http://invites.yahoo.com/ From db.list at PMPKN.NET Thu Aug 10 15:30:42 2000 From: db.list at PMPKN.NET (David Bowie) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:30:42 -0600 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: : From: Kim & Rima McKinzey : >As in "SloAne", "lamB", "duCk", "WeDnesday", "bellE", , "Gnash", : >"Honest", , , "Knock", "haLf", "Mnemonic", "damN", "irOn", : >"Pseudo", , , , "busTle", "cheqUe", "Write", , , and ? : A while ago I was trying to come up with a word with a silent letter : for every letter of the alphabet. Is there one for q? I don't : really remember all of them just now. Depends on which letters you count as silent in "sacque". If it's the Q and U, then you've got two birds killed with one highly obscure stone. David Bowie Department of English Assistant Professor Brigham Young University db.list at pmpkn.net http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Thu Aug 10 14:49:05 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:49:05 -0500 Subject: survey Message-ID: I seem to recall Vickie Neufeld telling me several years ago that there was some sort of study and that users rarely used a dictionary for anything but guidance in spelling a word. Bob Wachal From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 10 15:59:28 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 11:59:28 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:42 AM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Not any Americans- but the Poles have a their own version of Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man, "Jestem I Ron Man" - so I know hundreds of ESL students who say that way. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sagehen at SLIC.COM Thu Aug 10 16:04:01 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:04:01 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob Haas writes: >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest & Northeast. The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) A.Murie From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Thu Aug 10 16:01:13 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:01:13 -0400 Subject: Hyphenation Message-ID: I think Barbara's fourth method ought to be dubbed "computerese". I see it frequently in poorly edited newspapers. The writers compose on computers. To save space, they just break the word at whatever place they're at when they run out of space at the end of a line. A corollary is the computer-composed piece that doesn't break words. The result is a large blank space at the end of a line because they next word is too large for the space available. Bob Barbara Need wrote: > > Would that it were so. I have seen some much BAD hyphenation in the > newspapers and books (even Harry Potter!), with biking, for example, > hyphenated between just about any two letters, or don't hyphenated between > the o and the n. > > This is clearly a fourth method (hit-or-miss!). From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 16:26:48 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:26:48 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in [ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = glottal stop) At 12:04 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: > Bob Haas writes: > >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces > >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > >Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all >my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest >& Northeast. >The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ >two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) >A.Murie _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 16:36:39 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 Subject: broadcasters Message-ID: I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down home." At 03:00 PM 8/9/00 -0400, you wrote: >You know, I find Brokaw damned entertaining, and that's because of his >eccentric speech. (Since I enjoy it, I won't call it a speech impediment.) >He's a fair journalist, and a good bit easier to take than Baba Wawa. But >in defense of even that over-inflated idiot, I still enjoy hearing diversity >on the radio or television. Just because they're network anchors doesn't >mean that they should speak some flawless "standard" English. And how's >about Rather? His speech may be fairly "correct" (oh my god, look at all >the scare quotes), but his delivery is more wooden than the collected >members of the Sequoia National Forest. The best American English you'll >hear on a network newscast is from Peter Jennings, a Canadian. I think it's >all part of some kinda plot. > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 13:40:58 -0400 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > > > Yes, I'm sure this is what Frank Abate was referring to (and Imus was > > mocking). In fact, maybe that's what I was interpreting as glottal > > stops. But of the 45 or so sounds in English (not 26), that's > > minor--annoying maybe (I admit it), but no more "illegitimate" than a > > Boston broadcaster's r-dropping. > > > > At 10:12 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote: > >> He also has strongly velarized l's, with little if any alveolar > >> closure. Maybe this is > >> what some perceive as a speech impediment. > >> DMLance > >> > >> Beverly Flanigan wrote: > >> > >>> What do you mean by speech impediment? Brokaw (from South Dakota, > not far > >>> from my Minnesota roots) has a most annoying habit of inserting glottal > >>> stops everywhere, but so does one of our secretaries, from southern Ohio. > >>> > >>> At 01:55 AM 8/6/00 -0700, you wrote: > >>>>> ...In > >>>>> the U.S. national news, I know Brokaw is Canadian. > >>>> > >>>> Peter Jennings is Canadian. Brokaw is American and has the speech > >> impediment. > >>>> > >>>> Rima > >>> > >>> _____________________________________________ > >>> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > >>> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > >>> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > >>> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > > > > > > _____________________________________________ > > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 16:42:08 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:42:08 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: sagehen wrote: > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all > my life, and use it myself. That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or "hour"? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From sagehen at SLIC.COM Thu Aug 10 16:56:26 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:56:26 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Thank you for letting me down lightly on this. I only realized too late, as the Popeye sound emerged from the silt of memory, what B. Haas intended by his query. -AM Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but >I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in >[ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name >of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" >than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = >glottal stop) > >At 12:04 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: >> Bob Haas writes: >> >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who >>pronounces >> >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? >> >>Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this pronunciation all >>my life, and use it myself. I've lived in the Pac NW, West Coast, Midwest >>& Northeast. >>The New Century Dict., Webster's New International,& OED all give /iron/ >>two syllables. (OED leaves out the r sound, of course.) >>A.Murie > > >_____________________________________________ >Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 10 05:14:43 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:14:43 +0800 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 12:26 PM -0400 8/10/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but >I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in >[ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name >of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" >than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = >glottal stop) > I've mostly heard (and always used) ["ay at rn], but the word I've noticed a lot of variation on is "irony". My native N.Y.C. pronunciation (since then, I've been mostly successfully teased out of it) was ["ay at rniy], even though I never really thought there was any etymological connection with "iron". This resulted in a nice metathetic relationship between "irony" and "ironic" ['ay"ran at k]. I don't know if my native pronunciation is listed in any dictionaries as a secondary (or tertiary) pronunciation for "irony"; it would also be interesting to see if others who share my syllabification but were non-rhotic in V_C environments (e.g "Boinie") would have "irony" as ["ay at niy], rhyming with Hermione, as well as rhyming "iron" with "Mayan". larry From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Thu Aug 10 17:17:09 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 10:17:09 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <3992DB60.48F4FF74@ling.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: Doesn't it come down to how they're pronounced? I can say them as one long syllable (and I believe many do), but in my dialect, they are two because a slight schwa comes into play before the /r/. Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com > -----Original Message----- > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On > Behalf Of Aaron E. Drews > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this > pronunciation all > > my life, and use it myself. > > That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but > counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or > "hour"? From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Thu Aug 10 17:55:59 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:55:59 +0100 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Benjamin Barrett wrote: > > Doesn't it come down to how they're pronounced? Well, I guess being a dialectologist would be pointless otherwise. :-) > I can say them as one long > syllable (and I believe many do), but in my dialect, they are two because a > slight schwa comes into play before the /r/. Personally, I don't think there is a schwa before /r/. I think the schwa *is* the /r/ (well, hooked schwa). For me, and I suspect for many of us two-syllablers, the 'schwa' is an off-glide of the preceding diphthong and the progression from that off-glide to hooked schwa. English doesn't like triphthongs for some reason, on the assumption that hooked schwa is vowel-like. We tend to insert /j/ or /w/ or glottal stops and sometimes /r/ itself (mostly in non-rhotic varieties) to prevent triphthongs. In words like 'fire', 'hour'/'how're', 'iron', the preceding diphthongs might become monopthongs before /r/, but still remain a diphthong because of hooked schwa (this would be the one long syllable). If the vowel remains a diphthong, an off-glide gets inserted before the vowel-like /r/ preventing a triphthong. This produces a (C)VCV string, the medial consonant indicating a syllable break (consider an epenthetic glide in "see it", "say it", "sew it", "do it"). I'm sorry this if this isn't very clear... I've just spent an hour or so trying to explain this to a semanticist. --Aa > > Benjamin Barrett > gogaku at ix.netcom.com > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On > > Behalf Of Aaron E. Drews > > > > Has anyone NOT heard AI @RN ('eye-ern)? I've heard this > > pronunciation all > > > my life, and use it myself. > > > > That's what I would use two. I would count it as two syllables, but > > counting syllables with /r/ is difficult. What about, say, "fire" or > > "hour"? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair \\ // \\// / / -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From einstein at FROGNET.NET Thu Aug 10 18:07:04 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 14:07:04 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Bob Haas wrote: > Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces > "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > I've heard EYE-un quite a lot when I was growing up in NY; here in SE Ohio there's a town Ironton whose native pronounce it ARN-t'n ... no "o" [nb scare quotes] in either. From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 19:08:03 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:08:03 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810122630.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Exactly, as in "I gots to eats me spinnitch, cause the i-ron in it makes me's strong!" Or something like that. Hmm, I just realized that Popeye and Jimmy Durante sound suspiciously similar. The sailor is not deflating in my estimation. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:26:48 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > > I also say AI at RN (actually with Canadian/Minnesota raising to [^y at rn]), but > I think Haas is referring to syllable-initial /r/, as in > [ayr at n]. Hypercorrecting newscasters in southern Ohio pronounce the name > of Ironton, an Ohio River town, as [ayr at nt@n]--I suspect to sound "better" > than the locals who say [arn?@n] and [arn] (as Don Lance noted). (? = > glottal stop) From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 10 19:14:05 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:14:05 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000810123633.01bee710@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: To be fair to Rather, I have noticed that in the past few years (good grief, he's been at the anchor desk for CBS for 20 years) Dan's become a bit more relaxed, but only a bit, as he reads the news. I enjoy watching him on Letterman cause there his Texas really does come out. I wish he offer more of that during news time. Is anyone out there familiar with CBS reporter Fred Graham. I don't know where he's from, but his voice is full o' twang. It's shockingly different from most of the bland voices you hear on television news, but that's what makes it so sweet. > From: Beverly Flanigan > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I > usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care > what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a > matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns > me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down home." From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 10 20:25:13 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 16:25:13 -0400 Subject: broadcasters In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In fact, I also don't mind listening to Tom Brokaw in interview formats (as in his recent talks about his WWII book), where he's much more relaxed and less glottally-velar in his speech. At 03:14 PM 8/10/00 -0400, you wrote: >To be fair to Rather, I have noticed that in the past few years (good grief, >he's been at the anchor desk for CBS for 20 years) Dan's become a bit more >relaxed, but only a bit, as he reads the news. I enjoy watching him on >Letterman cause there his Texas really does come out. I wish he offer more >of that during news time. Is anyone out there familiar with CBS reporter >Fred Graham. I don't know where he's from, but his voice is full o' twang. >It's shockingly different from most of the bland voices you hear on >television news, but that's what makes it so sweet. > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:36:39 -0400 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: broadcasters > > > > I agree with you; I don't want "flawless" English either. In fact, I > > usually watch Dan Rather, who speaks (SE?) Texas English. I don't care > > what English the newscaster speaks; with regard to Brokaw, it's strictly a > > matter of personal (dis)taste--maybe it's his speed and glibness that turns > > me off. Jennings to me sounds "wooden" and pompous; Rather seems "down > home." _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 10 21:05:11 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:05:11 EDT Subject: Slang & Ski Message-ID: SLANG One theory is that "slang" comes from Norwegian. I went to the National Library today, and I got the e-mail addresses of some linguists. I checked the Norwegian dictionaries with a librarian--I have my doubts about a Norwegian origin for "slang." Any opinions? -------------------------------------------------------- SKI The OED has "ski" (noun) from about 1885 (discounting an early citation from the 1700s) and "ski" (vebr) from 1893. The Association for the Promotion of Skiing (Skiforeningen) was founded in 1883. The ski jump I went to today was made in 1892. According to the Ski Museum: 1843--first ski competition 1850--Sondre Norheim made skis 1867-68--first ski race in Oslo (then Christiana) 1883--Ull Ski Club founded From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:26:23 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:26:23 -0500 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy observed, among other things: > Tracking could consist of having a set of volunteers (perhaps households) > keep a record of when/why/how they use a dictionary over the course of, > say, a year. They could, for instance, be given a worksheet to keep with > their dictionary, in which they note the date, the word, what part of the > entry they were looking for (definition, pronunciation),how satisfactory > they found the information and how easily they found it on a scale of 1-5. It occurs to me this might be relatively easy to set up in conjunction with one of those web-based online dictionaries. Words searched for could be tracked automatically, so human beings would be asked to provide just introspective information (a usefulness rating, a few "think-aloud" comments in a text box) ?? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:29:51 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:29:51 -0500 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >The was never pronounced? I thought (Middle) English had a phonemic Why are these melodies popping into my head? "silent L, silent L..." "no-L, no-L..." (I'm sorry.) mk _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Thu Aug 10 22:52:26 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:52:26 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The L you say! (anon.) --On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 5:29 PM -0500 Mai Kuha wrote: > > Why are these melodies popping into my head? > "silent L, silent L..." > "no-L, no-L..." > (I'm sorry.) > mk **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 11 02:33:46 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:33:46 -0700 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >"iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? Do you mean 2 syllables? Or do you mean pronounced as the cartoon character? I have a 2 syllable pron, but it's I @rn - not the I r at n I think Popeye used. Rima From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Fri Aug 11 03:14:27 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:14:27 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Mark Mandel's comment gives me an opportunity to define "system" and explain how our keyless pronunciation system can handle a non-English word like "Skoplje." This may not be very relevant, but "system" is "a form of organization" as in "a system of philosophy; buddy, capitalist, caste, classification, monetary systems; the decimal, immune, merit systems; a computer system for handling a payroll; the pronunciation system of a dictionary." (The User's? Webster) Since the User's? pronunciation system is meant for English speakers (I thought I killed or at least scotched "the native speaker" circa 1985 in The Native Speaker Is Dead!), pronunciation respellings are given in anglicized form. This system doesn't fail if its basic principles are adhered to. First we ascertain the common Slavic pronunciation of "Skoplje" from an authoritative source. Yugoslavs may say the word in two syllables, but the English speaker cannot handle the palatalized "l" sound with ease. An acceptable English pronunciation has to be in three syllables, "-lje" becoming "-lee.ay." The first syllable, "Skop-," is heard as either short "o" (as in "cop") or diphthong "o" (as in "cope"). The keyless respelling is then written as (SCOP.lee.ay) or (SCOPE.lee.ay). I would consider a respelling such as (SKOHP.lyeh) as seen in some encyclopedias rather un-English and too abstract for the common English speaker. I hope you find this keyless pronunciation clear enough for Americans, natives and non-natives. Tom Paikeday THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's? Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca =================== Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Thomas Paikeday writes: > > >>>>> > Everyone prefers a keyless pronunciation system. So how do > you define "system"? > <<<<< > > You have hit the nail on the head. English spelling is so chaotic and > context-dependent that any phonological "system" based on it must fail, . . . > (The example I remember of the last one, perhaps from _Black Lamb and Grey > Falcon_ [or was it vice versa?], was "Skoplje". Can anyone give this a > clear keyless pron for Americans?!) > > A senior co-worker once objected to the symbols I was establishing for the > phonemes of American English: "Surely you can make them clearer so they'll > be obvious to any native speaker." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Aug 11 06:01:08 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:01:08 -0700 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <398ABB840005AC06@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: >From an old-fashioned (how times change!) SPE perspective, it is the most likely solution to posit /r/ underlyingly and generate the [@] phonetically (of course the rules would have to be ordered to create the /ay/ first from underlying tense //i//). [I once proposed a "diaphonemic" generative system to link regional varieties via a sort of shallow-level comparative reconstruction which aproximated the SPE results; it's in the Harold Allen readings.] So Aaron is right in this. From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I'm guessing, without checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? Rudy From JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR Fri Aug 11 07:03:48 2000 From: JIM.WALKER at WANADOO.FR (JIM.WALKER) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 09:03:48 +0200 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I'm guessing, without >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? > For me, a British English speaker (not RP, but non-rhotic), 'iron' and 'ion' are pure homophones. Viz. the Bob Marley song (certainly not an RP speaker, by any stretch of the imagination): "Iron, Lion, Zion", where all three words rhyme. Jim From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 11 10:15:30 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:15:30 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has /hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' (whatever that means) non-rhotic. >I'm guessing, without >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? I don't think there would be retroflexion at all in . In either a one-syllable or a two-syllable parse, the (r) is in rhyme, and cannot, therefore, be realised as [r] ever. In a two syllable parse, the second syllable would have to be /-r at n/ in order for [r] to be realised.... leading to a spelling pronunciation. As for and becoming homophonous: definitely possible, especially in normal speech. In citation forms, you might get a short, lax, back, rounded vowel (upside-down script 'a'.... bloody ascii) for , but that's listed as a secondary pronunciation in my pronouncing dictionary. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 11 14:43:55 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 07:43:55 -0700 Subject: Pronouncing letters [totally frivolous] Message-ID: Are these sung in the key of L... or does it just sound like L? --- "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > The L you say! > > (anon.) > > --On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 5:29 PM -0500 Mai Kuha > wrote: > > > > > Why are these melodies popping into my head? > > "silent L, silent L..." > > "no-L, no-L..." > > (I'm sorry.) > > mk > > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * > McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 02:50:02 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:50:02 +0800 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 11 14:39:27 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:39:27 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) Message-ID: Rima McKinzey asks: >>>>> The"o" in "iron" is silent?? <<<<< and Robert Kelly reacts: >>>>> I've heard speakers (south midlands?) say 'iron' as a monosyllable, though a 'long' one, something like /aHrn/. In that sense, o is not pronounced...but I think the original posting meant to say 'o is not pronounced in the ways we usually associate with o' <<<<< Yes, Robert, that latter is what I meant. Thank you. -- Mark From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 11 14:48:50 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:48:50 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday writes, with an unfortunate type of encoding [his lines wrap at this point]-----------------------------------------| >>>>> --------86E2E1A82CEDC765A4473F9B Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Mark Mandel's comment gives me an opportunity to define "system" and exp= lain how our keyless pronunciation system can handle a non-English word like "Skoplje." [...] Since the User's=99 pronunciation system is meant for English speakers (I= thought I killed or at least scotched "the native speaker" circa 1985 in The Nati= ve Speaker Is Dead!), pronunciation respellings are given in anglicized form= =2E This system doesn't fail if its basic principles are adhered to. First we ascertain the common Slavic pronunciation of "Skoplje" from an authoritative source. Yugoslavs may say the word in two syllables, but th= e English speaker cannot handle the palatalized "l" sound with ease. An acceptable English pronunciation has to be in three syllables, "-lje" bec= oming "-lee.ay." The first syllable, "Skop-," is heard as either short "o" (as = in "cop") or diphthong "o" (as in "cope"). The keyless respelling is then written as (SCOP.lee.ay) or (SCOPE.lee.ay)= =2E I would consider a respelling such as (SKOHP.lyeh) as seen in some encyclop= edias rather un-English and too abstract for the common English speaker. I hope you find this keyless pronunciation clear enough for Americans, na= tives and non-natives. <<<<< That works for your dictionary, but wouldn't work for our purpose of speech recognition. With most foreign words we assume that at least some speakers who use them at all will pronounce them approximately as they're pronounced in their source language, and then we try to approximate that pronunciation with our English phoneme set. That creates clusters and syllables that cannot occur in English, and your assumptions, not mentioned above but implicit in the approach, fail because of the difference in our goals. The same would be true for any dictionary that tried to give a closer approximation than your of the source-language pronunciation of foreign words. Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Fri Aug 11 15:24:45 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:24:45 -0400 Subject: Wired? Message-ID: A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him up the way You did." What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean "made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM Fri Aug 11 15:27:46 2000 From: epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM (Pearsons, Enid) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:27:46 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: Random House lists both ['ayr at niy] and ['ay at rniy], as does Webster's New World. No time to check the others at the moment, but I betcha the second pron appears in all or most. And it's mine. Enid -----Original Message----- From: Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU] Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 10:50 PM To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Fri Aug 11 15:41:00 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 08:41:00 -0700 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: larry horn: On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"... i do (or did; in professorial mode i now have onset r rather than nuclear r). "irony" was homophonous with "iron-y", as in "this water has a iron-y taste". arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), a bit older than larry, from a bit southwest of nyc From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Fri Aug 11 16:07:43 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 11:07:43 -0500 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: Is RP like NE dialects in shifting from r-deletion to r-epenthesis? I don't recall whether an RP speaker would say [kjub@ Iz] or [kjub at r Iz]. As to ['ay at rniy], I have that in casual speech, except that my initial diphthong is [@y] (SE Michigan Canadian Raising). Herb Stahlke >>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 08/10/00 09:50PM >>> At 11:15 AM +0100 8/11/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >> From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to >>recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be >>derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > >I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the >like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has >/hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' >(whatever that means) non-rhotic. > As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). It always seemed to me that in such cases (including "silent" final consonants in masculine French adjectives that show up in the feminine) it's more economical and explanatory to assume that the alternating segment is underlying present (and deleted) rather than absent (and mysteriously inserted in just those forms that do alternate). On a related subject, since I didn't get any response last time I mentioned it, do any other listees (from NYC or elsewhere) share my native ['ay at rniy] pronunciation for "irony"--or, if non-rhotic, the hypothesized variant ['ay at niy]-rhyming-with-Hermione? larry From gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM Fri Aug 11 16:17:25 2000 From: gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM (Benjamin Barrett) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 09:17:25 -0700 Subject: Wired? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000811112009.00931ce0@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: As you guess, it's wiring as in internal circuitry. It seems that wiring usually refers to the brain and/or nervous system. Check out these citations (search for wired): http://nuitari.serv.net/geek/essays/obsessions.html http://www.northheartland.org/1999/051699m.htm http://www.e-democracy.org/mn-politics-archive/9711/2618.html I don't have time to check for definitive citations, but these were found from AltaVista by searching for "how we're wired" (using the quotation marks). Benjamin Barrett gogaku at ix.netcom.com -----Original Message----- Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 8:25 AM A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him up the way You did." What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean "made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Fri Aug 11 17:36:25 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:36:25 -0400 Subject: silent letters (was broadcasters) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I-ron. I myself say I- at rn > From: Kim & Rima McKinzey > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:33:46 -0700 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: silent letters (was broadcasters) > >> Not for Popeye. Has anyone out there ever encountered anyone who pronounces >> "iron" with two syllables like the cartoon character? > > Do you mean 2 syllables? Or do you mean pronounced as the cartoon > character? I have a 2 syllable pron, but it's I @rn - not the I r at n > I think Popeye used. > > Rima From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Fri Aug 11 19:01:55 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:01:55 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:50 AM +0800 11/8/00, Laurence Horn wrote: >As someone weaned on SPE, I'm wondering how treating RP as >underlyingly non-rhotic would allow you to handle the standard >alternations and sandhi phenomena (e.g. when a word with a final -r >is followed by a vowel-initial word, or suffix). You have to take a theoretical step back to the structuralists, but incorporate autosegmental notions. What Giegerich (my supervisor) has proposed for RP is that /r/ becomes [r] in onset and [@] in rhyme, or [3] in stressed rhymes.... allophones of the same phoneme kind of thing. There is phonetic basis as well as complementarity for this assessment. Intervocalically, /r/ is in both onset and rhyme. By being in onset, [r] is phonologically obligatory (socially, it isn't, depending on the orthography/history). By being simultaneously in the rhyme, any changes like centring diphthongs can be accounted for. The most important thing I've discovered is to stop calling it 'intervocallic' and call it 'ambisyllabic'... (same with American flapping). This accounts for word-final, pre-vocalic r. It also accounts for a-historic r. At 11:07 AM -0500 11/8/00, Herb Stahlke wrote: >Is RP like NE dialects in shifting from r-deletion to r-epenthesis? I >don't recall whether an RP speaker would say [kjub@ Iz] or [kjub at r Iz]. Neither. In fact, I doubt there ever was actual deletion (and therefore no shift to epenthesis). Instead, [r] (official IPA alveolar trill)(archaic Scots) became an alveolar retroflex approximant (modern Irish English), then the retroflex loosened up a bit (American), then loosened up a bit more (non-rhotic England). Somewhere in that progression, /r/ went from a consonant to a glide, and a glide becomes a vowel in coda, and being a vowel, all sorts of phonotactics get involved. In fact, I believe, that pretty much the same thing happened in proto-American English. That is /r/ became a glide and is now realised as a vowel in codas (borrowed from Khan 1976). We just happened to keep our tongues bunched up a little more, preventing a merger of /r/ and /@/. What I'm saying is that the difference between non-rhoticity and rhoticity (as it is realised in American English) isn't all that great. In both groups /r/ is a consonant in onset but a vowel-like segment in rhymes. The difference is the actual articulation of the rhyme segment. This is where traditional definitions of rhotic and non-rhotic begin to get a bit fuzzy, and me calling RP underlyingly non-rhotic was based on the traditional definition. And yes, it is [kjub at r Iz]. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Fri Aug 11 19:34:06 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:34:06 -0500 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic except in environments that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" DMLance "Aaron E. Drews" wrote: > > > > From a more surfacy comparative point of view, it makes sense to > >recognize the /@r/ as a sequence, since then r-less varieties can be > >derived by dropping the /r/, but leaving the /@/. > > I would disagree with this. In short, I would say that RP (and the > like) have /schwa/ in exactly the same places American (rhotic) has > /hooked-schwa/. But, I also assume that RP is 'underlyingly' > (whatever that means) non-rhotic. > > >I'm guessing, without > >checking, that at least some versions of RP in England might drop the > >retroflexion, leaving /ay at n/. Does this ever converge with ? > > I don't think there would be retroflexion at all in . In either > a one-syllable or a two-syllable parse, the (r) is in rhyme, and > cannot, therefore, be realised as [r] ever. In a two syllable parse, > the second syllable would have to be /-r at n/ in order for [r] to be > realised.... leading to a spelling pronunciation. > > As for and becoming homophonous: definitely possible, > especially in normal speech. In citation forms, you might get a > short, lax, back, rounded vowel (upside-down script 'a'.... bloody > ascii) for , but that's listed as a secondary pronunciation in > my pronouncing dictionary. > > -- > ________________________________________________________________________ > Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh > http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and > aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics > > Bide lang and fa fair \\ // > \\// / > / From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Fri Aug 11 20:25:00 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 15:25:00 -0500 Subject: "monachie": not in OED Message-ID: I was contentedly reading "Reports of Criminal Law Cases, with Notes and References. . . .", by Jacob D. Wheeler, volume II, Albany: Gould, Banks & Gould/N. Y.: Banks, Gould & Co., 1851, when I came upon an unfamiliar word, which proved to be not in the OED nor the DAE. Peter Bogert, a cartman, testified as a witness to a fatal affray that had arisen on Chamber Street, New York, in 1823. Bogert's testimony is summarized, not given verbatim. He said that Ward was driving a cart "upon a walk"; Robinson was crossing the street, on foot. No contact was made, but Robinson, evidently feeling his personal space was being violated by Ward's horse, grabbed its bridle and pulled its head. "When Robinson thus took hold of the horse's bridle, Ward laid hold of his monachie, and threw it at him. [Monachie is said to be a Dutch word, and was explained to mean a fore rung of the cart, to which the lines were occasionally made fast, about three feet long, three inches by two and a half in thickness, at the bottom, and lessening almost to a point at the top, usually made of oak or hickory.]" (p. 124) The last sentence is in [] in the original. Another witness is quoted as testifying: "Heard Ward only say, in reply to a suggestion of witness that a cartman had struck deceased with the rung of his cart, that 'it was not with his rung, but with his monachie.'" (p. 127) I am naturally not familiar with the construction of horse-carts, and I don't understand where the monachie would be attached to the cart. Has it other names in other parts of the country? Can anyone offer a Dutch etymology? Not to leave you folks in suspense: Ward eventually whacked Robinson on the head with the monachie; Robinson was not knocked out, refused assistance, and walked away, but died the next day. There was evidence that Robinson was drunk, other evidence that Ward was "a mild and worthy young man", and so he was acquitted of manslaughter. GAT From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Fri Aug 11 20:12:52 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 16:12:52 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:01 PM 8/11/00 +0100, Aaron Drews wrote: And yes, it is [kjub at r Iz]. I too hear the liaison /r/ in British English. But I have a colleague who adds a final schwar to many words, as in [manIk at r] for Monica and even [j at r] for 'yeah'. He's from Manchester but spent many years first in the U.S. and then in Japan and has been with us one year now. Where does this come from? Is it a kind of hypercorrection toward presumed American English? Wolfram and Schilling-Estes suggest that this happens "in some varieties ... at the end of sentences, as in 'I got the idear' " (1998, p. 39). Has anyone else heard this? in both Brit and Am Eng? And a related case of liaison: Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly trying to suppress his East Tennessee English. But the other day he said something like "we'll need an extry amount of (whatever)," adding a neat palatalized liaison between the two vowels. A breath of fresh air! And finally: I heard that there was to be a segment on NPR last Sunday on the two candidates' dialects. Did anyone hear it? Is it available somewhere? Was it worth hearing?? _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 11 21:00:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:00:15 EDT Subject: Norway noshes Message-ID: Greetings again from Oslo, Norway. This place is a "Scream." Life really feels weird when you enter the Kon Tiki Museum and you hark back to your days on Easter Island. PRINCE OF NORWAY--this vodka drink seems popular here. FJEKBEKK--this vodka drink is also on a lot of menus, whatever it is. PIGGELIN--this vodka drink was also on a menu, whatever it is. TYRKISH PEPPER SHOT--on a drink menu under "shots." TULIPAN COFFEE--don`t know what this is. "SANDEFJORD BUTTER"--this was in quotes on a menu at EGON (a restaurant nearthe Grand Hotel). "BIFFSNADDER"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "strips of beef with pineapple, baby onions, mushrooms and Bernaise sauce." "BLACK AND WHITE"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "one fillet of beef (sirloin) with pepper sauce and one fillet of pork with Bernaise sauce." Off to a fjord tomorrow. Attached is more hell from Abuzz and the New York Times. This NEVER ends. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York City Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:33:16 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2251 URL: From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Fri Aug 11 21:54:13 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:54:13 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <39763D3F.1D32@tc.umn.edu> Message-ID: And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." At 05:43 PM 7/19/00 -0600, you wrote: >In Minnesota, at least in my experience, "barber shop" has been "the >haircutting place for >men," and "beauty shop" has been "the haircutting place for women." >"Beauty shop" seems to be >getting usurped by "salon," and "salon" is becoming "the unisex >haircutting place," which I >think was already suggested. The haircutting chains in Minnesota are >definitely unisex. > >(Incidentally, how about those "haircutting-place" names, eh? For >instance: "Sail on into >Linda's Hair Port," "Hair-itage," and (my personal favorite) "Language of >Hair"--perhaps >unemployed linguists could take up work in "hair as a second language.") > >Anna Fellegy _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 12:18:17 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:18:17 +0800 Subject: Wired? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000811112009.00931ce0@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: At 11:24 AM -0400 8/11/00, Kathleen Miller wrote: >A pastor said of Bill Clinton, "Thank You, God, that You wired him >up the way You did." > >What, pray tell, does that mean? I'm guessing it's supposed to mean >"made" but I can find no other evidence of wired = made, constructed. > > Maybe he just meant to allude to the fact that Bill Clinton is hard-wired... From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 12:55:17 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:55:17 +0800 Subject: possible citation of possible interest Message-ID: This question came up on another list-- ============ I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) but now derogatory. ============ --and it made me wonder whether anyone here (e.g. Fred, who might consider it as a possible item for the Dictionary of Quotations, if it IS an actual quotation) had come across it. It's a great example to use in class to illustrate meaning change, assuming it's legit. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 11 13:30:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 21:30:35 +0800 Subject: "monachie" In-Reply-To: <1F4AE991DD1@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: George A. Thompson writes: >[Monachie is said to be a Dutch word, and was explained to mean a >fore rung of the cart, to which the lines were occasionally made >fast, about three feet long, three inches by two and a half in >thickness, at the bottom, and lessening almost to a point at the top, >usually made of oak or hickory.] What I first thought of was the town in Bergen County, New Jersey of (or almost of) this name, but I have no idea for what or whom this town was named. (Monachie is near Woodbridge, NJ and the two towns share some services.) In any case, the official name of the town is spelled MOONACHIE, although this doesn't stop a plethora of web sites from deleting one of the O's (hard to tell which). But then the majority of web hits for "MONACHIE" accessible via google.com involve a (non-rhotic) misspelling of the French word for monarchy. I've always found "Moonachie" quite evocative and poetic whenever I've passed the highway exit for the town, just by Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. Moonachie looks so much like it should refer to the condition of indescribable languor and desolation from which we all suffer on occasion (can I sing you a heartbreaking country ballad about my moon-achie heart?), even though it's doubtless pronounced differently. It is possible, though, that "Monachie" was the original form, whether or not the reference was to a cart rung. At least Northern New Jersey is within the right general area for a place name of Dutch origin, unlike the following... From a web site about Mono (County and Lake), CA: =========== The county is named after Mono Lake which, in 1852, was named for an Indian tribe that inhabited the Sierra Nevada from north of Mono Lake to Owens Lake. The tribe's western neighbors, the Yokuts, called them monachie meaning "fly people" because the pupae of a fly was their chief food staple and trading article. =========== Yum. Doesn't hardly seem to have much to do with George's clipping, though, does it? larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 11 21:00:15 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:00:15 EDT Subject: Norway noshes Message-ID: Greetings again from Oslo, Norway. This place is a "Scream." Life really feels weird when you enter the Kon Tiki Museum and you hark back to your days on Easter Island. PRINCE OF NORWAY--this vodka drink seems popular here. FJEKBEKK--this vodka drink is also on a lot of menus, whatever it is. PIGGELIN--this vodka drink was also on a menu, whatever it is. TYRKISH PEPPER SHOT--on a drink menu under "shots." TULIPAN COFFEE--don`t know what this is. "SANDEFJORD BUTTER"--this was in quotes on a menu at EGON (a restaurant nearthe Grand Hotel). "BIFFSNADDER"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "strips of beef with pineapple, baby onions, mushrooms and Bernaise sauce." "BLACK AND WHITE"--also in quotes at EGON, this contains "one fillet of beef (sirloin) with pepper sauce and one fillet of pork with Bernaise sauce." Off to a fjord tomorrow. Attached is more hell from Abuzz and the New York Times. This NEVER ends. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York City Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:33:16 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2251 URL: From pds at VISI.COM Sat Aug 12 02:28:20 2000 From: pds at VISI.COM (Tom Kysilko) Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 21:28:20 -0500 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000811175343.00bf2e80@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 05:54 PM 8/11/2000 -0400, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." I always thought it was: Hare today, goon tomorrow. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From RonButters at AOL.COM Sat Aug 12 19:15:43 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 15:15:43 EDT Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/2000 4:18:47 PM, flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU writes: << Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly trying to suppress his East Tennessee English >> Given the relatively small amount of time that Gore spent in Tennessee during his formative years, it seems to me unlikely that there is much South Midland stuff that he really needs to suppress. From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sat Aug 12 20:05:50 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 16:05:50 -0400 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <42.948b176.26c6fc5f@aol.com> Message-ID: >In a message dated 8/11/2000 4:18:47 PM, flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU writes: > ><< Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I think, because he's constantly >trying to suppress his East Tennessee English >> To which Ron Butters replies:> >Given the relatively small amount of time that Gore spent in Tennessee during >his formative years, it seems to me unlikely that there is much South Midland >stuff that he really needs to suppress.<< Maybe it was the years spent trying to put on the appropriate sound to be thought of as a home boy to his constituents. A. Murie From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 12 22:57:10 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 17:57:10 -0500 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] Message-ID: In my undergrad language and society class this fall, I'd like to assign one reading on language in the gay community, and spend one 75-minute period on the topic. Any recommendations for what to assign as reading and how to spend that time in a way that is likely to do more good than harm? The absence of this whole topic from intro texts and syllabi (at least all the ones I have on hand at the moment) is glaring, and I've never seen or heard this absence discussed anywhere. I hope the reason is that everyone except me has already expertly figured out how to integrate it in the courses they teach. The first time I taught a course on language variation, even less had been written, so in desperation I assigned Barry Zeve's article "The Queen's English: Metaphor in Gay Speech." That was a dumb idea, because I didn't fully understand the article myself. The ins and outs of the closet metaphor were baffling. Having looked at Gregory Ward's bibliography (http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~ward/gaybib.html),I'm considering two possibilities: Graf and Lippa's article in the 1995 "Beyond the Lavender Lexicon..." book, in which they briefly demonstrate differences between two groups of gay speakers; or chapter 4 in William Leap's 1996 book, on characteristics of "conversations that occur outside of gay-centered speech settings". I have this glimmer of a sense, though, that really doing justice to the topic might require subtle shifts or even fundamental revisions to what we (or just I?) normally do in intro courses. To be honest, I'm not willing to do that kind of deep thinking about it right now. Also, I'm not prepared to facilitate a discussion based on a reading that deals with, say, the language of personal ads or of AIDS or has a really angry tone. I probably wouldn't do well, and students might go away remembering only that discussing gay issues was tense. Actually, no matter how nonthreatening the assigned reading may be, I'm worried that I won't react fast enough to any stereotyping comments well-intentioned students may make. That hasn't happened yet, but there is a danger that I'll inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or myths because of lack of experience with facilitating discussion on the topic. (But, in this sink-or-swim occupation, what can one do but keep trying and learn from mistakes?) So anyway, I'm asking for a quick fix (tell me what's the right thing to do!). Thanks in advance for any insights or discussion, and I'm sorry this message is so long. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sat Aug 12 11:47:56 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 19:47:56 +0800 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 5:57 PM -0500 8/12/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >In my undergrad language and society class this fall, I'd like to assign >one reading on language in the gay community, and spend one 75-minute >period on the topic. Any recommendations for what to assign as reading and >how to spend that time in a way that is likely to do more good than harm? > In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your suggestions look equally germane, although book chapters sometime presuppose discussion from earlier chapters in a way that self-standing articles don't. Anyone else have suggestions? I'll be making up my new syllabus in a couple of weeks for this fall's version of the dialects course, so my and Mai's eyes will be equally peeled.* larry *Can that be right? Do people really keep their eyes peeled? pealed? And why? I can't find either sense in my AHD! From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 00:24:08 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 19:24:08 -0500 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: (...) > In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at > Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one > lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual > orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of > Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender > lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal > Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in Thanks. I seem to have missed the Cameron book entirely. I'll look for it. > _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles > from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender > Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your I was thinking about those two chapters too. The Barrett chapter seemed a little too academic to me, but your students find it manageable then? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Sun Aug 13 05:22:06 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 01:22:06 -0400 Subject: POOT-yin/POOCH-in Message-ID: First I have to make my encoding ouchless, which I will do on the Sabbath. Speech recognition is a bit out of my depth, but I will study what is available at the Dragon website and would like to ask you a couple of questions privately. Many thanks. TOM PAIKEDAY ================== Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > Thomas Paikeday writes, with an unfortunate type > of encoding > [his lines wrap at this point]-----------------------------------------| > [ . . . ] > That works for your dictionary, but wouldn't work for our purpose of speech > recognition. With most foreign words we assume that at least some speakers > who use them at all will pronounce them approximately as they're pronounced > in their source language, and then we try to approximate that pronunciation > with our English phoneme set. That creates clusters and syllables that > cannot occur in English, and your assumptions, not mentioned above but > implicit in the approach, fail because of the difference in our goals. The > same would be true for any dictionary that tried to give a closer > approximation than your of the source-language pronunciation of foreign > words. > > Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company > Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist > 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Aug 13 06:04:15 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 23:04:15 -0700 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <3993DDA5000175E2@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Mai, Thanks so much for bringing up a genuinely significant question for the list, and thanks to Larry for sharing a suggestion. Larry -- it would be helpful to have also at least an outline of your lecture, and, as Mai asked, any suggestions on how you handled the topic. In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. I usually give a small survey assignment, and this time one student chose to do it within the gay/lesbian community, looking for possible regional variation in terminology (or difference in familiarity based on length of residence). It is also easy to bring the topic into the standard part of the discussion of why linguistic differentiations of any type develop or are maintained or lost (Yiddish being a prime historical example). Rudy From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Aug 13 10:20:00 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 06:20:00 -0400 Subject: Missing variable Message-ID: Larry H said: >> While we are able to use Chapter 7 of Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal Hygiene_), << >> Anyone else have suggestions? I'll be making up my new syllabus in a couple of weeks for this fall's version of the dialects course, so my and Mai's eyes will be equally peeled.* larry << Larry et al. I cannot suggest readings for what follows, but may I put to the list an observation, which may be discussed in the literature, re what I see as a gender-related speech phenomenon. Some older (pre-teen and up) girls and women tend to "whistle their Ss"; I do not know a phonetic term for this, but it seems to involve pronunciation of S with the very tip of the tongue positioned dentally, rather than back on the alveolar ridge. Of course, this very characteristic of speech is used mockingly and jocularly in attempts to mimic some gay speech, by comedians and the like, but I am not speaking of that here, although the fact that THIS characteristic is commonly used in this jocular way suggests the association of this phenomenon to female speech. In any case, my further observation is that females who have this speech characteristic seem to be more "traditional" in their use of makeup and fashion -- that is, their use of makeup tends to be more apparent, and their hair and dress more in tune with "conventional" female fashion trends. Clearly, this is a personal observation, not based on formal study, but I wonder if others have noted this, or if there is scholarship discussing it. Perhaps it could be part of class discussions on gender speech differences? Frank Abate Dictionary & Reference Specialists (DRS) Consulting & Lexicographic Services (860) 510-0100, ext 2311 abatefr at earthlink.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 01:53:29 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 09:53:29 +0800 Subject: Missing variable in intro courses [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 7:24 PM -0500 8/12/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: >(...) >> In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at >> Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one >> lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual >> orientation as a variable. While we are able to use Chapter 7 of >> Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender >> lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal >> Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in > >Thanks. I seem to have missed the Cameron book entirely. I'll look for it. It also has a good chapter on "political correctness" that I use for a different course. > > _American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles >> from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased: Zwicky on "Two Lavender >> Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community". Your > >I was thinking about those two chapters too. The Barrett chapter seemed a >little too academic to me, but your students find it manageable then? > I wasn't sure, since this is a course with no pre-requisites designed mostly for non-majors. I'd be happy to hear about alternative selections. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 03:25:37 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 11:25:37 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Mai, > Thanks so much for bringing up a genuinely significant question >for the list, and thanks to Larry for sharing a suggestion. Larry -- it >would be helpful to have also at least an outline of your lecture, and, as >Mai asked, any suggestions on how you handled the topic. Most of the relevant lecture last time I gave it dealt with the putative attributes of gay male and lesbian speech. We saw that some of the factors associated (with or without reliable evidence) with women's speech (in particular, the lexical and intonational variants defining Women's Language nominated by Robin Lakoff (and Jespersen before her) are also seen as characterizing gay male speech styles. (The sibilant issue brought up by Frank Abate in his recent post would be a case in point.) This led outward to a consideration of the issue of how gay speakers and communities can be identified by such variables; there's a lot less literature on defining lesbian speech communities, but there are a couple of useful articles (Moonwomon-Baird's and Queen's) in the Queerly Phrased anthology that I had students read in last year's Langauge, Sex & Gender class. > In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. I usually give a >small survey assignment, and this time one student chose to do it within >the gay/lesbian community, looking for possible regional variation in >terminology (or difference in familiarity based on length of residence). > It is also easy to bring the topic into the standard part of the >discussion of why linguistic differentiations of any type develop or are >maintained or lost (Yiddish being a prime historical example). > We use "Dialects of English" as a way to lure students in, but we do spend a lot of time talking about the dangers of the term "dialect". Besides, according to today's New York Times Magazine, I am, after all, a dialectologist ;) I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part of the course. I wish we had time to go over some of the issues Lynne Murphy touches on in HER paper about bisexuals and identity in that same (Hall & Livia) anthology, but the Dialects courses moves too quickly. From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:28:31 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 12:28:31 -0500 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike was like: > > (...) In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" > >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly > >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather > >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most > >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced > >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. (...) And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: (...) > I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic > variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although > we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part > of the course. (...) Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:47:11 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 12:47:11 -0500 Subject: /s/ [Missing variable] In-Reply-To: <002301c00510$0b3c7120$4601a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: (...) > Some older (pre-teen and up) girls and women tend to "whistle their Ss"; > I do not know a phonetic term for this, but it seems to involve > pronunciation of S with the very tip of the tongue positioned dentally, > rather than back on the alveolar ridge. (...) This must be just a coincidence (unless a popular entertainment figure with universal appeal is behind this) but I could swear I heard the phenomenon you describe earlier this summer, when I returned after a long absence to the Canary Islands (which is the closest thing I have to what more normal people call "home"). I spent an afternoon with an old friend from high school. She sounded as always, but her 14-year-old daughter and her friend pronounce /s/ with a quality I can't remember hearing before in Spanish. They sounded more front to me, but there was more to it. My friend's 8-year-old son didn't have it, I think. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From michael.gottlieb at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 17:49:04 2000 From: michael.gottlieb at YALE.EDU (Michael K. Gottlieb) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 13:49:04 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Mai Kuha wrote: > And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: > (...) > > I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic > > variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although > > we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part > > of the course. (...) > > Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead > of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, > a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could > be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered > messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought > up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this > organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. As an alumn of Professor Horn's course, I suppose it's appropriate for me to chime in to say that contextualizing the issues you're addressing under general headings is an excellent way to go, both in terms of how the students will receive you, and how they will organize your lecture in their mind. Addressing the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered messages and meanings" is much better done in a general discussion of pragmatics, etc., as you suggest. I think this will be easier for your student, and easier for you, as well. Professor Horn's class was structured in such a way a particular theory or general trend was the topic of the day. He THEN incorporated and discussed the examples you're bringing up here. The effect was a greater understanding of theory, and a greater wealth of examples for each. This also gave Professor Horn, I believe, the freedom to bring up interesting and current topics wherever he saw fit, which allowed him some room to improvise and work examples brought up in class into his lectures. He would not have been able to do this if he had designated one day to be "sexual orientation day." Of course, if I'm remembering this incorrectly, I'm sure Professor Horn will correct me. However, I guess the lesson then would be that your students are going to reconstruct your course in their memory however they please, anyway. (But I doubt it.) Mike Gottlieb From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 13 06:09:26 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 14:09:26 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:28 PM -0500 8/13/00, Mai Kuha wrote: >At 11:04 PM -0700 8/12/00, Rudolph C Troike was like: > >> > (...) In my American English course [still avoiding the term "dialect" >> >because of its inescapably perjorative meaning] last year, I too-briefly >> >included the topic under 'Slang', which I also usually deal with rather >> >briefly, although it is the one topic most undergrads resonate to most >> >readily. This is one context in which the topic can be easily introduced >> >since most of the usages tend to fit into this label. (...) > >And then, on Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn was all: >(...) >> I'm not sure most of my discussion of orientation as a linguistic >> variable really fits within a general discussion of slang, although >> we do touch on some issues in that intersection in a different part >> of the course. (...) > >Still, it's an interesting alternative for organizing the topics. Instead >of having, so to speak, a "sexual orientation day" on the course schedule, >a general discussion of pragmatics and cross-cultural communication could >be a good place to discuss e.g. the exchanges with subtle "gay-centered >messages and meanings" that Leap reports. Other aspects could be brought >up during discussions of language & identity, and so on. Done right, this >organization of topics might even send a more inclusive message. > Good point. There's another aspect of the issue that hadn't occurred to me before teaching it. We're always trying to bring out the fact that no variety of English (or whatever) is intrinsically the default or unmarked or basic version, although some variants might be socially less or more stigmatized in some contexts. In addition to the standard Labovian type arguments for the logic of non-standard English, a nice way to show this is in dealing with both gender- and orientation-related varieties, where it appears to be straight male speech patterns that are arbitrarily constrained, while the corresponding (stereotypic) female and gay male patterns are defined by the absence of these constraints on expressiveness (e.g. in pitch range over a specified interval). So we're not necessarily dealing with a marked "gay" or "women's" pattern, but rather with the absence of the (stereotypic) straight male features (characterized by monotone, restricted lexicon, etc.). larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 13 20:30:26 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 16:30:26 EDT Subject: Bergen bites Message-ID: Greetings from Bergen, Norway. This was the home of composer Edward Grieg (see the film bio SONG OF NORWAY). NORWAY star Florence Henderson is hiding from me here--maybe she really did like Greg Brady better. "FLO! YO, FLO!" It's raining here, but I'm told it always rains here. -------------------------------------------------------- HEALTH TOURISTS; STOLEN GENERATION The TIMES OF LONDON has been doing a front page series on "health tourists"--people who visit England to take advantage of the National Health Service. The "Stolen Generation" in Australia lost their legal case this week. Both terms have been around awhile--check Nexis. -------------------------------------------------------- NORWAY IN A NUTSHELL The popular "Norway in a Nutshell" tours have been going on here for at least 50 years. I don't know if this is useful for "in a nutshell." An old slogan of Norway appears to have been, from a poster in Flam: "Norway--The Land of the Midnight Sun." Whatever that means. -------------------------------------------------------- O-KE O-KE was a brand of cigarettes that was in a display in the WWII museum on Oslo. -------------------------------------------------------- FOOD & DRINK A place in Flam served these drinks: LONG DRINKS: Fjellbekk San Fransisco Singapore SLing Snow Ball Black Russian Irish Coffee SHOT: Galliano Shot Cacao Shot NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINKS: Furukroa Special Olsen Driver San Fransisco Light Reindeer is served everywhere. "Smorbrod" (open sandwiches) are also popular. I had "lefse" at the Folk Museum. There is also "Vestlandlefse" (West Coast buttered bannock). The name of the country is in the dishes "Norwegian meatballs (kjottkaker)" and "Norwegian almond cake (fyrstekake)." From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 14 10:24:32 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 06:24:32 -0400 Subject: Bergen bites Message-ID: Barry P said: >> An old slogan of Norway appears to have been, from a poster in Flam: "Norway--The Land of the Midnight Sun." Whatever that means. << This refers to the fact that in far northern latitudes, near and around the summer solstice, the sun does not set until very late. At the solstice itself, it is still light at midnight. Frank Abate From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 12:33:48 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 08:33:48 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: I have a question for teachers of dialects: Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the stereotypic? I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at least in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually summarized) seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other types of conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of sorting out the elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, unless he wants to get fired. For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups of women in specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 13:08:57 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:08:57 +0100 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: Joe Pickett asked: > So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly > exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the > variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? Whose stereotypes are being bashed? It's social scientists' stereotype that men try to dominate conversations and women are cooperative, but I find that this isn't the stereotype that my students usually have. When I teach about gender roles and speech, I start by asking the students for their stereotypes of men's and women's speech, and stereotypes I usually hear are things like "women nag," "women gossip and bitch," "men talk about sports". I usually get to gender discussions after discussing cross-cultural communication. I introduce the notion of "solidarity" and "deference" cultures, and ask students whether men or women can be typed as belonging to one of these cultural types, and at least half of them associate men with solidarity (more cooperative) and women with deference (more hierarchical). Rather than trying to discard stereotypes, I try to get the students to look for the causes of them and what value judgments come with them. We discuss how the miscommunication that arises through differing assumptions in the conversation, and how these lead to stereotyping and judgments. Some of it ends up being the kind of thing that you might read in _Ladies' Home Journal_ ("Does your spouse understand you?!?"), but with 19-year-olds who are just starting to play the part of independent adults, it's new to them to think critically about their own communicative styles and how they interact with others'. So, while we do look discuss individual variation and contextual changes (e.g., women physicians' style may be closer to male physicians' than to their women patients), a lot of what we focus on is comparing communication in heterosexual couples to that in same-sex close friendships. And while I point out that we're dealing with statistical generalizations, I also note that you can't do social science without generalizations (and the realization that they are just generalizations). Every time I've taught this, women have far outnumbered men in the class. Often there's only one guy. That's unfortunate. Another thing that disturbs me when teaching this is the occasional one-up-woman-ship among female students. In a couple of the places I've taught, the classroom discussion degrades into "well MY boyfriend does this", "well MY boyfriend does that", "well my FIANCE..." until each of them has proved that she has a boyfriend. (My British students didn't do this, this year. Hurrah! I've found civilization!) Lynne From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Mon Aug 14 13:17:14 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:17:14 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Safire cited this in 1997, "In ''Crazy English'' (1989), Richard Lederer told of Queen Anne's supposed comment in 1710 on seeing the completion of Sir Christopher Wren's magnificent edifice, St. Paul's Cathedral: ''awful, artificial and amusing.'' At the time, that was a royal compliment, with awful meaning ''awe-inspiring,'' artificial ''artistic'' and amusing ''amazing.'' Katy At 08:55 PM 8/11/00 +0800, you wrote: >This question came up on another list-- >============ >I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to >have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: >"How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a >favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) >but now derogatory. >============ >--and it made me wonder whether anyone here (e.g. Fred, who might >consider it as a possible item for the Dictionary of Quotations, if >it IS an actual quotation) had come across it. It's a great example >to use in class to illustrate meaning change, assuming it's legit. > >larry From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 13:24:12 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:24:12 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really interesting. I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? Joe Pickett From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 11:56:59 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:56:59 +0100 Subject: Varieties of English Message-ID: At 7:47 PM +0800 12/8/00, Laurence Horn wrote: >In the Dialects of English course I co-teach Obviously, there are many of you on this list that teach a similar course. I'd like to mention the launch of a new science-fiction novel written entirely in Scots. It is called _But and Ben a-go-go_ and it should be available on Amazon. While I'm leery of classifying Scots as a dialect, Scots is certainly a variety of West Germanic very closely related to English and has a common ancestor in Old English and therefore might be useful in a course such as Larry's. A local review said it might only be accessible by those living in Scotland. I would disagree. I would say it is as accessible as written AAVE, Twain's rendition of slave speech, Chicano English and the like.... once you get used to it. Of course, there are the social implications of having a contemporary piece of fiction in a dialect . If anyone is interested in a review copy for a course, let me know. If anyone is interested for the sake of interest, I'm sure you have a bookmark for Amazon. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF" --Death From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 11:23:12 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:23:12 +0100 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: <39945528.F88A47D3@missouri.edu> Message-ID: >RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic >except in environments >that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" >DMLance I suppose you mean 'linking' as in phonological sandhi. Traditionally, there has been a distinction between 'linking-r' and 'intrusive-r', the linking phenomenon being in historic/orthographic instances of (r), and intrusive-r being the Cuber is and drawring. And RP isn't consistently 'rhotic' in a linking realisation. It fluctuates because of social stigma. As for SPE, it has a lot going for it, but I don't like the idea that I'm carrying around pre Great Vowel Shift phonology in my head. I have enough problems coping with three (major) varieties of English on a daily basis. --Aa -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 13:37:03 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 09:37:03 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > This question came up on another list-- > ============ > I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to > have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: > "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a > favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) > but now derogatory. Clearly it couldn't have been James I who said this. Nigel Rees covers it in the June 1996 issue of his "Quote...Unquote" newsletter. Rees says that King James II, among others, is said to have praised St. Paul's as "amusing, awful, and artificial." Rees writes: "Simeon Potter mentioned in Our Language (1976) that 'When King James II observed that the new St. Paul's Catherdral was amusing, awful, and artificial, he implied that Sir Christopher Wren's creation was 'pleasing, awe-inspiring, and skillfully achieved.' ... A request to the Librarian of St. Paul's (the aptly-named J. Joseph Wisdom) failed ... to turn up an original source for the remark." Personally, I find this anecdote puzzling, since one-third of it seems to depend on the word "amusing" being a negative word in contemporary speech, whereas, as far as I know, to call a building "amusing" would be a compliment nowadays. Another way to put my point is that I don't think "amusing" is a word that has changed its meaning much over the centuries. Or, if it has changed its meaning, it has changed in the opposite direction, from a negative signification (see OED, sense 1) to a positive one. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 14:24:18 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:24:18 +0100 Subject: ambanxious Message-ID: This word is used by a Toronto-based hacker in an interview in the current _New Scientist_ (www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion_225117.htm l): "...younger knives really don't have the same kind of balance maybe, and are a little more ambanxious to do all kinds of things. I don't know anybody in the CDC that I wouldn't trust." Haven't found _ambanxious_ anywhere else, but I like it. Also note here _knives_, apparently meaning 'hackers'. But unclear if that's lexicalized, or just building on an earlier statement that "I'm not one of the sharper knives in the drawer when it comes to hacking." The former seems more likely. Lots of interesting underground techie jargon in this interview, if that kind of thing interests you... (CDC = Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker organization.) Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 02:30:54 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:30:54 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <8525693B.004516E9.00@checkout.hmco.com> Message-ID: At 8:33 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >I have a question for teachers of dialects: > >Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the stereotypic? > >I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm >sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. > >It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, >education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make >intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at least >in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually summarized) >seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the >researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is >evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive >conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of >their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of >conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other types of >conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of >sorting out the >elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How >often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a >meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, >unless he wants >to get fired. > >For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups >of women in >specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often >betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. > >So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject chiefly >exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the >variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? A lot of this research has been done, and I would expect it to be covered in most careful courses in language and gender. A lot of the literature in fact consists of examinations and critiques of what you're calling the stereotypes. On interruptions, for example, I recommend "Interruptions, gender, and power: a critical review of the literature", by Deborah James and Sandra Clarke (from the _Locating Power_ anthology). Penelope Eckert has played an important role in sorting out the different factors you mention (class, age, social expectation, as well as sex of speaker), as has Peter Trudgill. Unfortunately, I don't end up getting to most of this material in my Dialects courses, due to time limitations. I do try to alert students to the dangers of simplification. Most of these issues, in particular the interaction of the social variables you cite, are better examined in a course devoted to language and gender. larry From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 14:41:03 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:41:03 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, except that his name provides some pretty cool rhymes. (I suppose one could argue that the claim of not knowing anything is in tune with FdS's claim that there are no positive expressions of meaning? And perhaps the chorus is a reference to all the conjugations that students of French have to do?) The lyrics, courtesy of stephinsongs.wiw.org: 6. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure A:002220 G:320033 D:x00232 I met Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this On love he said "I'm not so sure I even know what it is No understanding, no closure It is a nemesis You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids," he said, "so [chorus] we don't know anything you don't know anything I don't know anything about love But we are nothing you are nothing I am nothing without love" I'm just a great composer and not a violent man but I lost my composure and I shot Ferdinand crying, "It's well and kosher to say you don't understand but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!" His last words were... [chorus] His fading words were... [chorus] OK, I'll stop procrastinating and bothering you now. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Mon Aug 14 14:54:44 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:54:44 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? Tom Kysilko wrote: > At 05:54 PM 8/11/2000 -0400, Beverly Flanigan wrote: > >And "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow." > > I always thought it was: > Hare today, goon tomorrow. > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > Tom Kysilko Practical Data Services > pds at visi.com Saint Paul MN USA > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 03:01:42 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:01:42 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <8525693B.0049B42F.00@checkout.hmco.com> Message-ID: At 9:24 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really >interesting. >I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? > >Joe Pickett I don't know about Lynne's experience, but I've had similar ones. I once offered a course at Wisconsin called "Women and Language" (this was back in the 70's, when that was the standard term for this area of research) and ended up with 15 or so female students and no male ones (beyond the first day, at which a couple of male students showed up). The next time I taught a similar course it was here at Yale, but as a residential college seminar, which permits the instructor to select applicants and therefore enabled me to make sure I had a mixed clientele. I have taught a regular linguistics curriculum course twice in the last 6 years, now under the title "Language, Sex & Gender". The first time my success in achieving a mixed group was as non-existent as it had been in Wisconsin; I ended up with 18 women and no men. (Again, two or three men showed up during "shopping period" but didn't return.) When I offered the course last spring, three male students stuck it out to the end along with 14 female students, and I think it made for somewhat livelier discussions. I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem, but for whatever reason "gender" in a course title may frighten off some of the male students, and then there's the critical mass problem, although Lynne evidently manages to hold on to the solo male student who doesn't mind being in that situation. larry From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 15:00:45 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:00:45 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places In-Reply-To: <39980834.527EA26D@msdw.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say "scoopin' up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. -- Steve K. From Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM Mon Aug 14 15:07:13 2000 From: Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM (Sallie Lemons) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:07:13 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: I'm in the "pickin'" camp myself. "Steve K." wrote: > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > > > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? > > Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. > > At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the > Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. > > Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say "scoopin' > up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. > > -- Steve K. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 15:12:53 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:12:53 +0100 Subject: missing variable in intro courses Message-ID: > At 9:24 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: > >Thanks, Lynne, for your thoughtful response. Your course sounds (?) really > >interesting. > >I wonder why more men don't sign up. What's wrong with them? > > > >Joe Pickett > > I don't know about Lynne's experience, but I've had similar ones. I > once offered a course at Wisconsin called "Women and Language" (this > was back in the 70's, when that was the standard term for this area >.... > I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem, but for whatever reason > "gender" in a course title may frighten off some of the male > students, and then there's the critical mass problem, although Lynne > evidently manages to hold on to the solo male student who doesn't > mind being in that situation. > > larry My courses have never been 'language and gender' courses (I've never been at a univ that could afford that in a curriculum). I was referring to courses in which I had a week or so on gender issues. At Wits, this course was for Speech and Hearing majors, and if there was one guy, then that was a big deal. (Want to go where the girls are? Become a speech and hearing major.) The Baylor course was a mix of Linguistics students and Education students, and women linguistics students outnumbered male ones by about 4-to-1 (and the Education proportion is even more lopsided). I've taught several all-female linguistics classes that have nothing to do with gender (including syntax courses). My most evenly proportioned male/female course was here last year, in the English Language Studies major. Lynne From Jeffrey.Chase at WANG.COM Mon Aug 14 15:10:21 2000 From: Jeffrey.Chase at WANG.COM (Chase, Jeffrey) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:10:21 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: I grew up in Heaven, I mean Iowa, and we picked as opposed to scooped. I live on the east coast now, and co-workers who grew up here do indeed scoop. JEC Jeffrey E. Chase Wang Government Services "Have red pencil. Will travel." Opinions expressed in this e-mail are solely those of the author, and not meant to imply endorsement by Getronics, Wang Government Services, or the United States Government. > -----Original Message----- > From: Sallie Lemons [SMTP:Sallie.Lemons at MSDW.COM] > Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 11:07 AM > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: Hair cutting places > > I'm in the "pickin'" camp myself. > > "Steve K." wrote: > > > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Sallie Lemons wrote: > > > > > ...you mean from "Litte Rabbit Foo-Foo"? > > > > Little Bunny Foo-Foo in my region. > > > > At school, we did a little survey, but never got around to mapping the > > Rabbit/Bunny isogloss. > > > > Also, some people say "pickin' up the field mice" and others say > "scoopin' > > up the field mice". I'm in the pickin' camp myself. > > > > -- Steve K. From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 03:33:59 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:33:59 +0800 Subject: possible citation of possible interest In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:37 AM -0400 8/14/00, Fred Shapiro wrote: >On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > >> This question came up on another list-- >> ============ >> I'm trying to trace an authoritative source for the remark, alleged to >> have been made by that King [James I] when he first saw St Paul's Cathedral: >> "How monstrous, awful, and artificial" - all terms then used in a >> favourable way (for an impressively large, awe-inspiring, work of art) >> but now derogatory. > >Clearly it couldn't have been James I who said this. Nigel Rees covers >it in the June 1996 issue of his "Quote...Unquote" newsletter. Rees >says that King James II, among others, is said to have praised St. Paul's >as "amusing, awful, and artificial." Rees writes: "Simeon Potter >mentioned in Our Language (1976) that 'When King James II observed that >the new St. Paul's Catherdral was amusing, awful, and artificial, he >implied that Sir Christopher Wren's creation was 'pleasing, awe-inspiring, >and skillfully achieved.' ... A request to the Librarian of St. Paul's >(the aptly-named J. Joseph Wisdom) failed ... to turn up an original >source for the remark." > >Personally, I find this anecdote puzzling, since one-third of it seems to >depend on the word "amusing" being a negative word in contemporary speech, >whereas, as far as I know, to call a building "amusing" would be a >compliment nowadays. Another way to put my point is that I don't think >"amusing" is a word that has changed its meaning much over the centuries. >Or, if it has changed its meaning, it has changed in the opposite >direction, from a negative signification (see OED, sense 1) to a positive >one. Meanwhile, on the list at which the query was first posed and through my own investigations on the web, we've come up with attributions to Charles II as well as James I (as in the original post), James II, and Queen Anne, and one for Samuel Pepys, along with one vote each for an unspecified male monarch and an unspecified female monarch. The adjectives in question include various orderings of pompous, monstrous, amusing, awful, and artificial, although always in a series of three. I ended up feeling skeptical that this anecdote reflects anything beyond a courtly urban legend, and Fred's note supports this skepticism. As we know, this sort of extreme variation in the particulars of such stories is characteristic of urban legends, although the "moral" (that words change meaning in radical and surprising ways) is more congenial to us than in most such cases. What it reminds me of is the more contemporary anecdote that pops up here every few years about the lecture (at an international conference or in a classroom) by a distinguished but pompous professor (of linguistics or philosophy) that concludes with the observation that while two negations in some languages cancel each other out and in other languages amount to a single negation, there is no language in which two affirmatives reduce to a single negative, to which a voice from the back of the audience (belonging to Saul Kripke of Princeton, Sidney Morganbesser of Columbia, or someone unidentified) comments "Yeah, yeah" (or "Yeah, right", or "Sure, sure", or...). larry From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 14 15:24:36 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:24:36 -0400 Subject: possible citation of possible interest Message-ID: Further on St. Paul's in London, and who said what. According to the cathedral's website [my added notes in brackets]: Wren's final plans were approved in 1675 [under James II]. Construction took 35 years, but services began there in 1697 [under William and Mary], with completion in 1710 [under Anne]. The website's history section (at least) does not relate the story about the royal quote, but it could not have been James I, of KJ Bible fame. Frank Abate From einstein at FROGNET.NET Mon Aug 14 15:44:00 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:44:00 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: On Saussure, you have to remember that Post-structuralism might just as well be called "Saussure Misunderstood"--he's right up there with Darwin, Einstein, & Heisenberg for supplying a popular concept, in this case Derrida's innovative idea that there's an infinite series of signs (by which he *doesn't* mean Saussure's fusion of a sound pattern with a concept but more like the popular meaning of "word") referring to one another and which are never "grounded" in Reality (completely ignoring Saussure's insistence on the social nature of language, which serves as a corrective to the individualistic conception that is so popular). What the song apparently has to do with Saussure is explicit in the chorus: we don't know anything. Lynne, talk to the people in Theory--you'll hear some fabulous misunderstandings of linguistics. (Marx is similarly distorted to justify our continuing as "culture workers"--but that's another tale...) -- db ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Mon Aug 14 15:52:16 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:52:16 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... At 03:41 PM 8/14/00 +0100, you wrote: >Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with >linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing >off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of >material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on >their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of >Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, >except that his name provides some pretty cool rhymes. (I suppose one >could argue that the claim of not knowing anything is in tune with FdS's >claim that there are no positive expressions of meaning? And perhaps >the chorus is a reference to all the conjugations that students of >French have to do?) The lyrics, courtesy of stephinsongs.wiw.org: > >6. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure > >A:002220 G:320033 D:x00232 > I met Ferdinand de Saussure >on a night like this >On love he said "I'm not so sure >I even know what it is >No understanding, no closure >It is a nemesis >You can't use a bulldozer >to study orchids," he said, "so > >[chorus] >we don't know anything >you don't know anything >I don't know anything about love >But we are nothing >you are nothing >I am nothing without love" > >I'm just a great composer >and not a violent man >but I lost my composure >and I shot Ferdinand >crying, "It's well and kosher >to say you don't understand >but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!" >His last words were... [chorus] > >His fading words were... [chorus] > > > >OK, I'll stop procrastinating and bothering you now. >Lynne > > >Dr M Lynne Murphy >Lecturer in Linguistics >School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences >University of Sussex >Brighton BN1 9QH >UK > >phone +44-(0)1273-678844 >fax +44-(0)1273-671320 _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 15:57:17 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:57:17 EDT Subject: Danish & Woodrow Wilson chef Message-ID: FYI. Barry Popik -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: refdesk Subject: Re: Woodrow Wilson question Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 08:56:56 -0400 Size: 3223 URL: From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Mon Aug 14 15:58:15 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 10:58:15 -0500 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: How is this trivial? Such a tape would be a great item to own, and to play as mood music during the minutes preceding class, and maybe to hand out to prospective students at pick-your-major-type fairs where physicists get to do all the fun demos. (But how to deal with the copyright issue?) Two more ideas, which I think actually don't have much to do with language, but superficially seem to: Laurie Anderson's "Language is a Virus" and Suzanne Vega has one with the words "if language were liquid, it'd be rushing in". -Mai On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > Every once and again, I threaten to make a mix tape of songs with > linguistics themes, but after I get past "Let's call the whole thing > off" and the Proclaimers' "Throw the R away", I tend to run out of > material. But here's one to add to the list: The Magnetic Fields, on > their magnum opus _69 Love Songs_, have a song called "The Death of > Ferdinand de Saussure." I'm not quite sure what it has to do with FdS, (...) _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Mon Aug 14 16:07:16 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:07:16 -0400 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:30 AM 8/14/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 8:33 AM -0400 8/14/00, Your Name wrote: >>I have a question for teachers of dialects: >> >>Does your analysis of male/female genderlects ever get beyond the >>stereotypic? >> >>I have done a little reading in this area -- very little compared to you, I'm >>sure. But I came away grievously disappointed. >> >>It seems to me there are too many variables, things like age, ethnicity, >>education level, social class, extent of social contacts, region, to make >>intelligent generalizations about male and female patterns of speech, at >>least >>in English. And so much of the research that I have seen (usually >>summarized) >>seems open to the criticism that the data were analyzed to support the >>researcher's presuppositions. An example: an interruption made by a man is >>evidence of his intent to dominate the conversation in the male competitive >>conversation style, while interruptions by women can be viewed as evidence of >>their eagerness to show they are engaged in the female nuturing style of >>conversation. Men are from Mars, is what it sounds like to me. Other >>types of >>conversation (like the business meeting) present the problem of >>sorting out the >>elements of social function and social expectation from those of gender. How >>often will a male administrative assistant try to dominate or interrupt a >>meeting of mostly women middle managers? Not very, I would say, >>unless he wants >>to get fired. >> >>For me the most interesting studies are the ones of specific groups >>of women in >>specific communities, and in these cases their conversational behavior often >>betrayed stereotypes. To which I say, bully for them. >> >>So, what do you say to your students? Are your classes on this subject >>chiefly >>exercises in stereotype bashing? are there was of eliminating some of the >>variables so that male/female generalizations are meaningful? > >A lot of this research has been done, and I would expect it to be >covered in most careful courses in language and gender. A lot of the >literature in fact consists of examinations and critiques of what >you're calling the stereotypes. On interruptions, for example, I >recommend "Interruptions, gender, and power: a critical review of >the literature", by Deborah James and Sandra Clarke (from the >_Locating Power_ anthology). Penelope Eckert has played an important >role in sorting out the different factors you mention (class, age, >social expectation, as well as sex of speaker), as has Peter >Trudgill. Unfortunately, I don't end up getting to most of this >material in my Dialects courses, due to time limitations. I do try >to alert students to the dangers of simplification. Most of these >issues, in particular the interaction of the social variables you >cite, are better examined in a course devoted to language and gender. > >larry I've taught a course called "The Language of Women and Men" for years and have recently found Jennifer Coates' _Women, Men and Language_ (Longman, 2nd ed. 1993) to be a balanced textbook, cognizant of the sociolinguistic research of Eckert et al. She also has a big fat anthology, _Language and Gender: A Reader_ (Blackwell, 1998) which is excellent--with cross-linguistic, cross-ethnic, cross-age, cross-social groups articles, plus several theoretical pieces. (The size and price nearly killed my students, but it's worth both.) A brand new book I just received also looks good: _Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse_, ed. Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton (Oxford UP, 1999). On attracting men into the course, I too have a hard time, though about 1/3 of my last class was male. They tend to be skeptical and even antagonistic, but this is good for the women in the class, who need to have their own stereotypes challenged. I also agree with Larry that it's very frustrating to try to deal with these complex issues in one or two days in my Sociolinguistics or Language in America class. We have another undergrad course, Language and Culture, where we can give it a bit more time. _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 16:19:52 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:19:52 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: > From: Beverly Flanigan > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to rhyme... Lynne From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 16:17:23 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:17:23 EDT Subject: Bergen bits--continued Message-ID: Greetings again from Bergen, from a strange keyboard. I thought that I remembered Land of the Midnight Sun somewhere else, but I was probably thinking about Land of the Rising Sun. ICE COFFEE Spotted once. Also spotted were CAPPUCINO and EXPRESSO. No wonder no one can spell anything. RUSSIAN CRAB ALASKAN KING CRAB comes from Russia and is called this. MINIBANK What ATMs are called. MAFIOZA PIZZA Contains tomato sauce, cheese, skinke and bacon. ELDORADO PIZZA Found twice. Contains tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and peppers. GRANDIOSA PIZZA Also found twice. Contains tomato sauce, cheese, and meat. A place called THE SCOTSMAN had these drinks... TOKYO ICED TEA...gin, vodka, midori, cointreau, sour, sprite YELLOW BIRD...Havana Club, banana liqueur, orange juice, sour FJELLBEKK...vodka, aquavit, lime juice, sprite ADVENTURE...gin, amaretto, lime juice, Russchian SLOW COMFORTABLE SCREW..gin, vodka, Southern Comfort, orange juice FLYING SCOTSMAN...gin, vodka, cointreau, banana liqueur, grenadine, sour, battery juice UNDER THE KILT...whiskey, galliano, banana liqueur, crea, lime juice ODDGASM--Girls favorite...gin, vodka, banana liqueur, sour, grenadine, Russchian From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 14 15:38:12 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:38:12 -0400 Subject: Hair cutting places Message-ID: Tom Kysilko writes: >>>>> I always thought it was: Hare today, goon tomorrow. <<<<< Foo! FOO!!! -- Mark From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Mon Aug 14 16:27:17 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:27:17 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: If we could find a song about Wittgenstein. In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000814115129.016a6e50@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: My apologies:) -- Katy ARTIST: Monty Python Philosopher's Drinking Song Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist Socrates himself was permanently pissed John Stuart Mill, of his own free will Drank half a pint of shandy was particularly ill Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day Aristotle, Aristotle Was a beggar for the bottle Hobbes was fond of his dram And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart "I drink therefore I am" Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 16:32:40 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:32:40 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > rhyme... Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 14 16:38:30 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:38:30 +0100 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs Message-ID: > > > From: Beverly Flanigan > > > > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > > rhyme... and Steve K said: > Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. As if I shouldn't be writing other things, Lynne From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 04:41:38 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 12:41:38 +0800 Subject: missing variable in intro courses In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000814115310.016a7e90@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: At 12:07 PM -0400 8/14/00, Beverly Flanigan wrote: >I've taught a course called "The Language of Women and Men" for years and >have recently found Jennifer Coates' _Women, Men and Language_ (Longman, >2nd ed. 1993) to be a balanced textbook, cognizant of the sociolinguistic >research of Eckert et al. She also has a big fat anthology, _Language and >Gender: A Reader_ (Blackwell, 1998) which is excellent--with >cross-linguistic, cross-ethnic, cross-age, cross-social groups articles, >plus several theoretical pieces. (The size and price nearly killed my >students, but it's worth both.) A brand new book I just received also >looks good: _Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse_, ed. >Bucholtz, Liang, and Sutton (Oxford UP, 1999). > For my last go round, I had the students buy Cameron's reader, The Feminist Critique of Language (Second edition), and used some articles from the Coates 1998 reader Beverly mentions; the latter has the disadvantage that most of the articles are idiosyncratically truncated by the editor, so in several cases I ended up going back to the original journals or anthologies to find the missing material. Her selections are very good, but I don't like the expurgation. There's some overlap between the Coates and Cameron but I found that useful; for example, each of them contains a useful critical article on Tannen's _You Just Don't Understand_, and I found it helpful to have students read both. larry From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 14 06:00:54 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:00:54 +0800 Subject: iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:23 PM +0100 8/14/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote: >>RP is underlyingly whatever it is, but it is surfacely non-rhotic >>except in environments >>that yield a linking rhotic realization. Larry and I say "Bring back SPE!!!" >>DMLance > >I suppose you mean 'linking' as in phonological sandhi. >Traditionally, there has been a distinction between 'linking-r' and >'intrusive-r', the linking phenomenon being in historic/orthographic >instances of (r), and intrusive-r being the Cuber is and drawring. > >And RP isn't consistently 'rhotic' in a linking realisation. It >fluctuates because of social stigma. Yes, I meant (and I assume DG meant) linking-r, which was why I mentioned such alternations as "the car" vs. "the car is..." rather than "Cuba" vs. "Cuber is". It's only if at least some vowel-final entries DON'T alternate in this way that you could really have an argument for an SPE-style abstract segment that deletes in the absence of vowel-initial suffixes and following words. Actually, it's really a Sapir-style argument, given his account of the abstract /t/ phoneme in that example of /dinit/ (where it shows up in alternations). > >As for SPE, it has a lot going for it, but I don't like the idea that >I'm carrying around pre Great Vowel Shift phonology in my head. I >have enough problems coping with three (major) varieties of English >on a daily basis. > Yeah, they do get carried away a bit. The late Ted Lightner was the best (i.e. most outrageous) exponent of the reductio ad absurdum style of SPE analysis; he related "night" and "nocturnal", and probably "hemp" and "cannabis", by synchronic rules of English phonology. I always had a weakness for the SPE analysis of "right" as /rixt/, not to mention "boy" with an underlying mid-front rounded vowel. But you can buy "car" with a final -r in non-rhotic/alternating dialects, or e.g. Fr. "heureux" with underlying -z, without shelling out for these more extreme cases. Larry From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 18:08:24 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:08:24 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky > instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. There's a trance group called boo maga that has a recording called Under Attack that samples a bunch of Chomsky's political sound bites. There's also a song called Noam CHomsky by Karma Covered Apple. A lot more turned up on my search of song lyrics Chomsky on google, and most of this music is available for download on mp3.com and other sites if anyone's interested. "Noam Chomsky" -- Karma Covered Apple Countin' constellations while you're looking through The microscop-i-pocalypse While speaking mega McMadonna log In industri-al-i-dosages Drive an Instamatic Cadillac Through every sociopolopoly It's all muh-nah* muh-nah monopoly There's no duh-de duh-dee dignity And realistic ???? Fall apart And it seems A li'l paranoid To me. Expecting confrontation plodding into view Through a telescopic catalog While they realign the cosmograph After brief important messages That they whisper into megaphones I hear it's really catastrophical I'm speaking purely philosophical And a circle And a square And a trapezoid You see. Broadcasting live from stations far inside the groove Spinning out the future retrospect The omega McMc alphabet Stepping out, standing invitations On ???? I see the demographic acrobat Writin' elements of artifact The realistic kinds of cul-de-sacs Through the circle Through the square Through the trapezoid. * Pronounced like the first 2 syllables of "monopoly." * With help from Kathleen Kramer. --- Steve K. From jester at PANIX.COM Mon Aug 14 18:35:44 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:35:44 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 14, 2000 12:32:40 PM Message-ID: > > > Great! Now if we could find a song about Wittgenstein.... > > > > Ah, the gauntlet has been thrown, I must now compose a song about > > Wittgenstein. Or at least a lyric about him. That'll be a fun one to > > rhyme... > > Isn't he referenced in Monty Python's "The Philosophers Song"? Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." Jesse Sheidlower OED From stevek at SHORE.NET Mon Aug 14 18:42:57 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:42:57 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: <200008141835.OAA09239@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: > > "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine > Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." Ah, but it does, internally: Wittgenstein/swine, just like Descartes/fart --- Steve K. From jester at PANIX.COM Mon Aug 14 18:46:19 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:46:19 -0400 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 14, 2000 02:42:57 PM Message-ID: > On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > > > Yes, but it doesn't rhyme: > > > > "And Wittgenstein was a beery swine > > Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel." > > Ah, but it does, internally: Wittgenstein/swine, just like Descartes/fart Of course you're right. I was looking at line endings only, though I supposed it could just as easily be written: And Wittgenstein Was a beery swine Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel. JTS From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 14 19:16:42 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:16:42 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Can anyone help this correspondent? >>Sirs, >> Of late I have heard some sound bites on the Rush Limbaugh talk show, >>having liberals use the above word (subject) as though every one knows what >>the word means. I have never heard of it. I sent an email to Mr. Limbaugh >>asking if he knew what the definition was and he never answered. >> I would appreciate an answer from you folks. My email address is >>gkrumm at netzero.net >>With grateful appreciation, >>George W. Krumm From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Mon Aug 14 20:53:41 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 13:53:41 -0700 Subject: "monachie": not in OED In-Reply-To: <1F4AE991DD1@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu> Message-ID: "Monachie" doesn't sound at all Dutch, and it doesn't appear in my big Nederlands Koenen dictionary (27th ed., Wolters 1981). The only thing close that is listed there is "monachaal," which means monastic. Since the Dutch word for monk is "monnik" (monk), a form with "ch" looks odd. The etymology is "Gr. monachos = alleen, alleen wonend, monnik," but probably it's a later borrowing than monnik, which has to have been borrowed way early, before the High German consonant shift. And in any case all this doesn't seem to get us any closer to a word for a wagon part which has no obvious connection with monks. Peter Mc. --On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 3:25 PM -0500 GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > > I am naturally not familiar with the construction of horse-carts, > and I don't understand where the monachie would be attached to the > cart. Has it other names in other parts of the country? Can anyone > offer a Dutch etymology? > > **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Mon Aug 14 20:51:05 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:51:05 -0400 Subject: her and Bush Message-ID: "When I speak, you will know my heart" George W. Bush As difficult as it is for me to believe, I just read the acceptance speech GW Bush delivered at the Republican National Convention. More surprising to me than Bush's laying claim to a Democratic agenda of social justice and environmentalism is GWB's use of "her" as a generic pronoun. See the passage below. GW has two daughters, so the pronoun works on a personal level for him, and I suppose that absolves him from making a political point with his pronoun. Usage fans might note also his comparative use of "equally." Does "more" here mean "not quite"? How much can be read between the lines of this speech! Code words galore! And what limits did you test, George? My generation tested limits--and our country, in some ways, is better for it. Women are now treated more equally. Racial progress has been steady, if still too slow. We are learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back. At times, we lost our way. But we are coming home. So many of us held our first child, and saw a better self reflected in HER eyes. And in that family love, many have found the sign and symbol of an even greater love, and have been touched by faith. Joe Pickett From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Mon Aug 14 21:45:06 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:45:06 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: This is an intriguing query. Mind you (all), I'm not about to take up listing to a highly charged, single-minded, political commentator given to diatribe in order to solve this problem. I tried Nexis for the three spellings... Nothing! I tried the Web... Nothing! (Well, one proper noun). A context or two in which the term is used would certainly help. I suspect the subject is politics. But that's just a guess. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 14 21:22:19 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:22:19 EDT Subject: Bergen bye-bye Message-ID: I'll be leaving Bergen, Norway tomorrow and might be off the internet for several days. This is a last, midnight roundup. The Clarion Hotel offers these drinks: Espresso Cappuchino Cafe au lait Kaffe Calypso Kaffe Advocat Irish Coffee Cafe Grand Marnier Montego Coffee (In OED?--ed.) Two pizza places serve "Peasana" pizza, which is cheese, tomato sauce, bacon, and onion. Peppe's Pizza has a "Pig's Knuckle" (ham and mushrooms), "New York" (salami and onion), and "Stars or Stripes" (ham or pepperoni, half-and-half, or a mix of both). An "Automat" is a parking meter machine, not something from Horn & Hardart. From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Mon Aug 14 21:26:43 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 14:26:43 -0700 Subject: Bergen bites In-Reply-To: <200008132031.QAA16502@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: --On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 4:30 PM +0000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Bergen, Norway. > > HEALTH TOURISTS; STOLEN GENERATION > > The TIMES OF LONDON has been doing a front page series on "health > tourists"--people who visit England to take advantage of the National > Health Service. The "Stolen Generation" in Australia lost their legal > case this week. Both terms have been around awhile--check Nexis. In a report from Norway, shouldn't that be "stollen generation"? :) **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Mon Aug 14 21:30:02 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:30:02 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Yes, the context is "liberals" criticizing "conservatives." At 05:45 PM 8/14/2000 -0400, you wrote: >This is an intriguing query. Mind you (all), I'm not about to take up >listing to a highly charged, single-minded, political commentator given >to diatribe in order to solve this problem. I tried Nexis for the >three spellings... Nothing! I tried the Web... Nothing! (Well, one >proper noun). A context or two in which the term is used would >certainly help. I suspect the subject is politics. But that's just a >guess. > >Regards, >David > >David K. Barnhart, Editor >The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] >barnhart at highlands.com >www.highlands.com/Lexik > >"Necessity obliges us to neologize." >Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 > From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 15 01:41:09 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 21:41:09 -0400 Subject: CLB's dictionary survey Message-ID: Sorry if I seem to be making short work of a long letter with many ideas that most testing experts might find useful. Two points I would like to make are, first, that I sort of agree with Lynne that most of those surveys or questionnaires that we are asked to fill out choosing alternatives like "never / occasionally / sometimes / often" as when we have purchased a new car don't serve any useful purpose as far as I can see. They seem too abstract. Secondly, the most telling observation I gathered in 1967 when my employer sent me on a "fact-finding tour" of the Canadian dictionary market was the following from one Prof. Richard H. J. Monk which I have quoted again and again since then and bears repetition, I think. "After 17 years of teaching in the schools of British Columbia and 11 at a university, I have yet to find a student who can make intelligent use of vowel systems or pronunciation keys as they appear in most dictionaries." Some of those who have written here on this subject have come close to the above observation of Dr. Monk, but nothing like the above for its practical insight, brevity, and forthrightness. It has stuck in my mind and proven quite true and accurate all these years. Tracking dictionary use in classrooms was what I did with the help of English teachers in the U.S. in the early 80's. But it was an informal survey and something more thorough, systematic, and more positive than Monk's observation may be what is called for at this time. T.M.P. THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca ============================================================ Lynne Murphy wrote: > > Thinking more about dictionary surveys... > > I've read various studies based on surveys, and I have to admit that when > I read them, I doubt their usefulness. (They're better than nothing, > but...) If someone asked me what I do when I use a dictionary, I doubt > that what I remembered doing would be the same as what I actually do. For > instance, if you asked me if I use the dictionary for pronunciations > never/occasionally/sometimes/often, I'd really be doing no better than > guessing, I think. [. . . .] I'd be particularly > interested in tracking dictionary use in classrooms... > > Lynne From galtatarscaia at YAHOO.COM Tue Aug 15 06:33:54 2000 From: galtatarscaia at YAHOO.COM (Galina Tatarscaia) Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 23:33:54 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I am so interested in words derived from the word YUPPIE, will you be so kind to tell in what way I can find these words ? Thanks a lot. Galina Tatarscaia. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail ? Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Tue Aug 15 09:59:40 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 05:59:40 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Tue Aug 15 10:20:26 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 06:20:26 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Does you request compounds that contain the word Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. guppie--green yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 15 12:13:55 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 13:13:55 +0100 Subject: coffee and... Message-ID: >From "Doing the Frango" by Andrea Cooper in today's Salon.com: [context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in Illinois. Is this well-attributed? The article's a nice bit of familiarity for those who've shopped at Field's and gorged on Frango mints. Lynne, a distant relative (by marriage) to Marshall Field Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From jester at PANIX.COM Tue Aug 15 13:24:11 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 09:24:11 -0400 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: from "Lynne Murphy" at Aug 15, 2000 01:13:55 PM Message-ID: > > [context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] > When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, > Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she > confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for > me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the > expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > > I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in > Illinois. Is this well-attributed? Yes, and it's certainly not limited to Chicago. In fact in four years of living in Chicago I don't think I ever heard it. DARE has a number of examples from NC, the West Coast, and elsewhere. The best doughnuts in the Northeast are to be had in a store called Coffee And in Westport, CT. HDAS has additional examples from the New York area. Jesse Sheidlower OED From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Tue Aug 15 13:30:03 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 08:30:03 -0500 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Coffee and" is an old slang term. DARE has "1901 in 1954 Weingarten _Amer. Dict. Slang_" as the first citation. See also "and" conj B5 for similar phrases. At 01:13 PM 8/15/2000 +0100, you wrote: >>From "Doing the Frango" by Andrea Cooper in today's Salon.com: > >[context: shopping for school clothes at Marshall Field's] >When the pile of discards had grown as colorful and layered as a trifle, >Gramma was finally ready to pause. "Oh, honey, I'm exhausted," she >confessed. "Let's stop for 'coffee and.'" She meant milk and a snack for >me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the >expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > >I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in >Illinois. Is this well-attributed? > >The article's a nice bit of familiarity for those who've shopped at >Field's and gorged on Frango mints. > >Lynne, a distant relative (by marriage) to Marshall Field > > >Dr M Lynne Murphy >Lecturer in Linguistics >School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences >University of Sussex >Brighton BN1 9QH >UK > >phone +44-(0)1273-678844 >fax +44-(0)1273-671320 > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Tue Aug 15 14:59:41 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 10:59:41 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: I have made a small collection of linguistic songs, and several of them are by Cat (Catherine) Faber. You probably haven't heard of her, except perhaps for Rima, but she's well known in the filk community. (Filk music: genre of music originating in the culture of science fiction and fantasy.) One of her songs, "Yogh and Ash and Thorn", is a takeoff (parody, "filk") of Kipling's "A Tree Song" (whose chorus begins, and whose subject is, "Oak and Ash and Thorn"), using a tune that I believe is by Leslie Fish (a very well-known filker). I don't believe Cat's song has been recorded, but I know I've heard a recording of this setting of Kipling. If anyone is interested I'll try to hunt it down. Cat's "Say Again, Tower" depicts the plight of an exploration starship returning to Earth after a few subjective years and encountering problems with language change. (Time slows down near the speed of light: many years may pass on Earth while you experience only a few.) I'm asking her permission to post the lyrics here. It is on the CD _As Good As Any_ by Echo's Children, which is the duo of Cat and Callie Hills. I thought it was available from Random Factors, a filk publisher (http://www.random-factors.com/index.html), but it's not listed there; maybe it's out of print. The only reference I could find through Alta Vista is http://www.sff.net/people/Julia.West/filk/asgoodas.htm . Also on _As Good As Any_ is "They Spoke With Their Hands", which according to the insert notes originated with an attempt to describe (by analogy) the experience of a telepath growing up in a non-telepathic community. This song is from the point of view of the only hearing person growing up in a deaf village. -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 15 16:02:46 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 11:02:46 -0500 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: I'll bet the fat boy from Cape Girardeau is just playing around with 'rubbish', one of his favorite words during the few short stretches of time I've been able to listen to him. It's not just what he says that bothers me -- it's the incivility of his personal attacks on all kinds of people. DMLance Barnhart wrote: > Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a > character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that > moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon > card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). > > Regards, > David > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 15 15:59:20 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 11:59:20 EDT Subject: Norwegian Kitchen Message-ID: Greetings from Balestrand. I type these things for over ten minutes, press SEND, then it signs me off because I'd been on too long and what I've written is destroyed. IT'S THESE DAMNED TROLLS! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!!!! IS-TE--Ice(d) Tea in Norwegian. Lipton again sells "Ice Tea." PANDA-BROD--A type of bread, but there are no pandas anywhere here. HAWAIIBURGER--A hamburger with a slice of pineapple. BRISLING--"Sardines" that come from Norway, not Sardinia. BOKBY--A Nowegian Book Town, as one place calls itself. DRAGSTIL--Dragon style church, for the roof decoration. THE NORWEGIAN KITCHEN by Aase Stromstad 57 pages, $16 Pg. 7--lefse. Pg. 13--Open-faced sandwich. Pg. 13--pinnekjott, lamb rubs, dried and salted... Pg. 13--Lukefisk, cod soaked in lye... Pg. 14--gamalost or "old cheese"... Pg. 19--Torrfisk. Pg. 21--Klippfisk. Pg. 23--Prince fish. THe story goes that this dish was first served to a Swedish prince when he was visiting Bergen some time in the 19th century. Pg. 25--Sandefjord butter Pg. 25--Pollack fillets with fried onions. Pollack is usually considered every day fare. Pg. 27--Bergen fish soup. Pg. 29--Gravlaks. Pg. 37--Ptarmigans with cream gravy. Pg. 43--Veiled farm girls. The best time to serve this delicious old time standby is in the fall when Norwegian apples are at their best. (WHERE ARE THESE NORWEGIAN FARM GIRLS??-ed.) Pg. 43--Can't resist. One of many delicious mousses. The name, of course, implies that it is so good that one can't resist helping oneself twice--or more. Pg. 45--Cloudberry cream. Pg. 47--Aquavit sorbet. Pg. 49--Sweet buns. There is nothing more Norwegian than these sweet buns with their strong cardamon flavor. Variations: Raisin buns Lenten buns Hot walls: This is a Bergen specialty. Shilling buns School buns Christmas loaf Pg. 51--Princess cake. Pg. 53--Prince cake. The story goes that the recipe for this cake originally came to us with wandering craftsmen from Austria who settled in Norway. In time it became the cake we know today. It has an accepted place on the coffee table and is often baked at Christmas. Pg. 57--Bishop. Norway's much revered cook and cookbook writer, Hanna Winsnes, who lived in the 19th century, was a woman who enjoyed the good things in life. She also believed in doing well for the "master of the house" and the many guests who came to their home. On cold winter evenings and at Christmad it was always a pleasure to warm oneself with her "bisp" or "bishop" as she called it. (Red wine, orange juice, sugar, orange peel, boiling water--ed.) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 04:14:20 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:14:20 +0800 Subject: Norwegian Kitchen In-Reply-To: <200008151559.e7FFxxf20560@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: At 11:59 AM -0400 8/15/00, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > >PANDA-BROD--A type of bread, but there are no pandas anywhere here. > Might this be marble rye, with dark (pumpernickel) and light rye in large patches? Panda-brod would be a nice name for this. larry From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 15 16:43:11 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:43:11 -0400 Subject: Norwegian Kitchen In-Reply-To: <200008151559.e7FFxxf20560@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: At 11:59 AM 8/15/00 -0400, Barry Popik wrote: >DRAGSTIL--Dragon style church, for the roof decoration. Dragons do indeed appear on the corners and gables of the roofs of a particular medieval style of church in Norway, the Stav Kirke, or church built of vertical staves of wood. The style combines pagan warding off of evil via dragons with the high steeple of the traditional Christian church. We have several copies of these churches in Minnesota. >THE NORWEGIAN KITCHEN >by Aase Stromstad >57 pages, $16 > >Pg. 7--lefse. >Pg. 13--Open-faced sandwich. >Pg. 13--pinnekjott, lamb rubs, dried and salted... >Pg. 13--Lukefisk, cod soaked in lye... >Pg. 14--gamalost or "old cheese"... >Pg. 19--Torrfisk. >Pg. 21--Klippfisk. >Pg. 23--Prince fish. THe story goes that this dish was first served to a >Swedish prince when he was visiting Bergen some time in the 19th century. >Pg. 25--Sandefjord butter >Pg. 25--Pollack fillets with fried onions. Pollack is usually considered >every day fare. >Pg. 27--Bergen fish soup. >Pg. 29--Gravlaks. >Pg. 37--Ptarmigans with cream gravy. >Pg. 43--Veiled farm girls. The best time to serve this delicious old time >standby is in the fall when Norwegian apples are at their best. (WHERE >ARE THESE NORWEGIAN FARM GIRLS??-ed.) >Pg. 43--Can't resist. One of many delicious mousses. The name, of >course, implies that it is so good that one can't resist helping oneself >twice--or more. >Pg. 45--Cloudberry cream. >Pg. 47--Aquavit sorbet. >Pg. 49--Sweet buns. There is nothing more Norwegian than these sweet buns >with their strong cardamon flavor. >Variations: >Raisin buns >Lenten buns >Hot walls: This is a Bergen specialty. >Shilling buns >School buns >Christmas loaf >Pg. 51--Princess cake. >Pg. 53--Prince cake. The story goes that the recipe for this cake >originally came to us with wandering craftsmen from Austria who settled in >Norway. In time it became the cake we know today. It has an accepted >place on the coffee table and is often baked at Christmas. >Pg. 57--Bishop. Norway's much revered cook and cookbook writer, Hanna >Winsnes, who lived in the 19th century, was a woman who enjoyed the good >things in life. She also believed in doing well for the "master of the >house" and the many guests who came to their home. On cold winter >evenings and at Christmad it was always a pleasure to warm oneself with >her "bisp" or "bishop" as she called it. >(Red wine, orange juice, sugar, orange peel, boiling water--ed.) Ah, now here you're making me hungry for good old Scandinavian cooking! In particular, for the many variations on sweet buns. The bishop red wine/juice drink is also called glogg (or is that Swedish?). _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 15 18:06:51 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 14:06:51 EDT Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT cookbook Message-ID: Greetings again from Balestrand and the hotel's computer. Free computer! Everyone's still at the buffet!...There's a Grieg concert here tonight. The previously cited cookbook was copyright 1999. This other cookbook was in the hotel gift shop here. NORWAY'S DELIGHT DISHES AND SPECIALTIES by Elise Sverdup Aschehoug, 96 pages, 99 krone ($8) 1957, tenth edition 1980, fifth printing 1994 Pg. 9--Arendal Cakes. Pg. 10--Bergen Twists (Bergenkringler). Pg. 10--Polar Bear's Eye (lsbjornoye). Pg. 11--Drammen Cream Cakes. Pg. 11--Fevig Mackerel. Pg. 11--Hallingdal Sour-Cream Bread. Pg. 12--Grimstad Rusks. Pg. 12--Hallingdal Bannocks (Hallingdallefser). Pg. 13--Trondheim Soup. Pg. 14--Aalesund Broth. Pg. 14--Oslo Sweet Soup. Pg. 15--Osterdalen Stew. Pg. 16--Kristiansund Dumpling. Pg. 16--Midnight Sun (Midnattsol). Drat, someone else finished the buffet. Does OED have all of these???? From stevek at SHORE.NET Tue Aug 15 21:00:11 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 17:00:11 -0400 Subject: coffee and... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > me, coffee and a cigarette for her. (It took years before I realized the > expression "coffee and" is unique to Chicago.) > > I've not heard the phrase 'coffee and', but I've only lived downstate in > Illinois. Is this well-attributed? In ten years of living in Chicago in various neighborhoods, I never heard it. --- Steve K. From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Tue Aug 15 23:37:25 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 16:37:25 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: Buppie, Puppie --- Barnhart wrote: > Does you request compounds that contain the word > Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie > syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. > guppie--green > yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? > > Regards, > David > > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail ? Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 12:07:36 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 20:07:36 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <20000815233725.22560.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: also Guppie (Gay Urban Professional) larry At 4:37 PM -0700 8/15/00, Margaret Lee wrote: >Buppie, Puppie > >--- Barnhart wrote: >> Does you request compounds that contain the word >> Yuppie (e.g. Yuppie >> syndrome) or words that are modeled on Yuppie (e.g. >> guppie--green >> yuppie, i.e. ecologically minded yuppie)? >> >> Regards, > > David >> From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 16 01:48:52 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 21:48:52 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: bubbie .... black yuppie Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged professional gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie huppie ..... hippy yuppie juppie ..... Another word for buppie nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional puppie ..... pretentious yuppie Rumpie ..... rural yuppie scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing power suppie ..... Southern yuppie woopie .....well-off older person Yappie ... young arctic professional yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person [yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ (electronic edition)!!! Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 15 15:21:03 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 23:21:03 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:48 PM -0400 8/15/00, Barnhart wrote: >bubbie .... black yuppie that's "buppie", I assume. ("bubbie" is something else again. ) I've come across "guppie" more often than any of these except possibly "buppie" and of course "yippie", which is not a "yuppie" spin-off. Yappie? Yeepie? Scuppie? I'll take your word for it. larry >Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie >dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged professional >gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie >huppie ..... hippy yuppie >juppie ..... Another word for buppie >nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional >puppie ..... pretentious yuppie >Rumpie ..... rural yuppie >scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues >skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing power >suppie ..... Southern yuppie >woopie .....well-off older person >Yappie ... young arctic professional >yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person >[yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] >Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie >Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime > >The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ (electronic >edition)!!! > From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 03:23:41 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 20:23:41 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: i feel somewhat apologetic about asking a slightly serious question in the context of general playfulness... but i've never been quite sure how to interpret spin-off terms like BUPPIE and GUPPIE (both of which i've heard used as actual descriptors, sometimes without any playful intent). are they, like YUPPIE, acronymic? [YUP 'young urban professional', BUP 'black urban professional', GUP 'gay urban professional'] or are they parasitic on YUPPIE, with its semantics *plus* the semantics associated with the B or G that replaces the Y? to personalize this somewhat, there was a time when i was a GUPPIE in either sense (a time when we we young and gay, as cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). i continue to be acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE. maybe GUPPIE and BUPPIE are ambiguous, between a narrower and a broader sense. things like this are not unknown. or possibly vague. it's so hard to tell. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), trusting that palo alto does indeed count as urban and that one course a quarter at stanford still counts as professional From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 16 06:41:43 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 02:41:43 EDT Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) Message-ID: Greetings again from Balestrand. The concert last night was given by Age Kristofferson, the second cousin of Kris. You can't leave Norway without hearing him do Grieg's "Trolls." I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know what Jesse has in storage. More from NORWAY'S DELIGHT: Pg. 16: Raggsteindal Rusks. Pg. 18: Hardanger Bannocks. Pg. 18: Telemark Flatbread. Pg. 22: Dancing Master's Soup. Pg. 24: Nail Soup. Pg. 29: Jansson's Temptation. Pg. 30: Glazier's Herring. Pg. 37: Mutton and Cabbage Stew (Farikal, Traditional Norwegian dish) Pg. 41: "Puss Pass." Pg. 47: Norwegian Lettuce Salad (Bladsalat). Pg. 48: Asparagus a la Skaugum. Pg. 55: Cream Dots (Flotelapper). Pg. 57: Monks. Pg. 65: Aristocrats. Pg. 74: Goro. (Attached is _another_ ABUZZ question for me to answer. Again, this is a question that the NY Times's book CURIOUS NEW YORKER avoided completely. ABUZZ, by the way, has ARCHIVES.) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: The Big Apple Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 22:12:51 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2166 URL: From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Wed Aug 16 11:07:26 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 07:07:26 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky said: >> (a time when we we young and gay, as cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). << The play she wrote is "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay", set in the pre-Depression era, centering on the lives of a couple of college-age rich kids. I was in a high-school production of it in 1968 or so, in the Cleveland area. At that time, in Cleveland at least, I don't recall any confusion or comments over the word "gay". When did the 'homosexual' sense begin to really supplant the older sense in general use? Frank Abate From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Wed Aug 16 12:23:21 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:23:21 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Arnold Zwicky wrote << i continue to be acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE.>> Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We actually deleted this term from AHD4. It is one of a small number of vocabulary deletes we made. Another is beach burner, what is now called a personal watercraft. You aren't likely to see many muppies riding beach burners these days, or if you do you'd call them something else. Joe Pickett From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 12:41:06 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:41:06 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: <200008160642.e7G6gHS13050@listserv.cc.uga.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know > what Jesse has in storage. OED's first use is 1857. Here's an earlier one I have found: 1831 F. W. Beechey _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait_ 335 The midnight sun ... tinges with a bright line all the northern circle. Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 16 12:54:20 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:54:20 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: from "Fred Shapiro" at Aug 16, 2000 08:41:06 AM Message-ID: > > On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > > > I checked OED--there's one slim "midnight sun," but I don't know > > what Jesse has in storage. > > OED's first use is 1857. Here's an earlier one I have found: > > 1831 F. W. Beechey _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's > Strait_ 335 The midnight sun ... tinges with a bright line all the > northern circle. And here's an earlier one yet, that I had in storage: 1827 R. Montgomery _Age Reviewed_ II. 211 All the tribe by Beazely was outdone, Who made, for novelty, a midnight sun! The purblind cocknies liked this wond'rous spell. Jesse Sheidlower OED From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 13:35:53 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 14:35:53 +0100 Subject: bread and butter pickles Message-ID: Hello again all-- Does anyone have any history on the term "bread and butter pickles"? (This is just for interests' sake, not serious research--don't put yourself out.) The pickles I've bought in a jar here are labelled "dill cucumbers", but they taste like bread and butter pickles to me. I assume that the term is American, since we seem to have many more varieties of pickled cukes than the British do (who seem to have gherkins, and things that are called 'dill' but don't taste like dill). It's not in AHD nor DARE, and my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook gives no indication of where they come from or why they're called 'bread and butter'. Lynne, who misses kosher dills Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 13:33:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:33:51 -0400 Subject: NORWAY'S DELIGHT (continued) In-Reply-To: <200008161254.IAA04945@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: Here's still an earlier citation for _midnight sun_: 1787 Joel Barlow _The Vision of Columbus_ 179 Where midnight suns their happier beams display. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Wed Aug 16 13:45:58 2000 From: jdhall at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (Joan Houston Hall) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 08:45:58 -0500 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <20000815233725.22560.qmail@web1404.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: "Among the New Words" in the Summer 1989 issue of American Speech includes buppie, dink(ie), dumpie, skippie, suppie, yappie, yup, as well as compounds with yuppie. From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Wed Aug 16 13:48:54 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:48:54 -0400 Subject: ribitash?, robitash?, rabitash? Message-ID: Or could it just be a play-around with the word, rubbish? The truth is not in yhe fat boy. Bob "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > > I'll bet the fat boy from Cape Girardeau is just playing around with 'rubbish', one of his > favorite words during the few short stretches of time I've been able to listen to him. > It's not just what he says that bothers me -- it's the incivility of his personal attacks > on all kinds of people. > DMLance > > Barnhart wrote: > > > Thanks, Joan. Could this possibly be _rapidash_? Rapidash is a > > character who is "very competitive and will chase after anything that > > moves fast in the hopes of racing it." The quote if from a Pokemon > > card owned by Grant Barnhat (age 8 1/2). > > > > Regards, > > David > > > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > > barnhart at highlands.com > > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 03:21:11 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 11:21:11 +0800 Subject: request In-Reply-To: <200008160323.UAA00678@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: At 8:23 PM -0700 8/15/00, Arnold Zwicky wrote: >i feel somewhat apologetic about asking a slightly serious >question in the context of general playfulness... but i've >never been quite sure how to interpret spin-off terms like >BUPPIE and GUPPIE (both of which i've heard used as actual >descriptors, sometimes without any playful intent). are they, >like YUPPIE, acronymic? [YUP 'young urban professional', BUP >'black urban professional', GUP 'gay urban professional'] >or are they parasitic on YUPPIE, with its semantics *plus* >the semantics associated with the B or G that replaces the Y? > >to personalize this somewhat, there was a time when i was a >GUPPIE in either sense (a time when we we young and gay, as >cornelia otis skinner, i think, put it). i continue to be >acronymically a GUPPIE, but i'm long past the years when i >could be described as a letter-substitutive GUPPIE. > >maybe GUPPIE and BUPPIE are ambiguous, between a narrower and >a broader sense. things like this are not unknown. > >or possibly vague. it's so hard to tell. > I think this is the case with many analogical formations of this type, although the context often does a better job of disambiguating in other cases. Take the "-burger" formative, for instance. Does the generalized "Xburger" denote 'hamburger with X' (or some variant, possibly 'hamburger in the style of X', where 'hamburger' entails ground beef or at least ground meat) or does it denote 'X placed between buns'? The meanings of cheeseburger and pizzaburger suggest the former (they don't denote respectively a piece of cheese and a slice of pizza served on a bun), but that of fishburger (an old term for what is also known as "filet-o-fish") or veggieburger presuppose the latter. The sense in which it's true that Arnold is (still) a guppie is the veggieburger sense, the sense in which it's false is the cheeseburger sense. larry From dsgood at VISI.COM Wed Aug 16 15:42:27 2000 From: dsgood at VISI.COM (Dan Goodman) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:42:27 -0500 Subject: (was linguistic songs) founding fathers on tape. Message-ID: In one time-travel novel, two people of a time a bit after ours listen to a tape recording which includes speech by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. One remarks that most Americans would be surprised to learn that Jefferson spoke with a hillbilly accent, and Franklin with a Boston accent. I suspect the first would surprise linguists also. That the author thinks "hillbilly" means "any and all southern". Would Franklin's Boston accent sound much like a contemporary Boston accent? Dan Goodman dsgood at visi.com http://www.visi.com/~dsgood/index.html Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much. From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 16:26:03 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:26:03 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: joe pickett, replying to my wondering about whether i can be described as a GUPPIE at my age: Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We actually deleted this term from AHD4. It is one of a small number of vocabulary deletes we made. upper end of middle-aged. not so sure about mature, except in age. affluent, for a humanities professor. dubious about ambitious. certainly not trendy. but i guess i'm within range of MUPPIE. unfortunately, MUPPIE loses that significant G. it's also a word i can't believe ever got used nonjokingly. so it's surely a good thing that AHD4 abandoned it. (i just got my copy of AHD4, by the way. these new editions *are* getting heavy, aren't they?) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), who recalls discovering the rev. r.j. lechmere guppy, of trinidad, in a dictionary many years ago From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 16:59:47 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 17:59:47 +0100 Subject: burgers (was: Re: request) Message-ID: Larry says: > in other cases. Take the "-burger" formative, for instance. Does > the generalized "Xburger" denote 'hamburger with X' (or some variant, > possibly 'hamburger in the style of X', where 'hamburger' entails > ground beef or at least ground meat) or does it denote 'X placed > between buns'? The meanings of cheeseburger and pizzaburger suggest > the former (they don't denote respectively a piece of cheese and a > slice of pizza served on a bun), but that of fishburger (an old term > for what is also known as "filet-o-fish") or veggieburger presuppose > the latter. The sense in which it's true that Arnold is (still) a > guppie is the veggieburger sense, the sense in which it's false is > the cheeseburger sense. There's a third interpretation of -burger: 'ground X (between buns)', and the confusing thing is that 'turkey burger' usually gets the 'ground' reading while 'chicken burger' often (this might just be outside the US: UK and SA) gets the 'unground' reading. Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 17:03:43 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 18:03:43 +0100 Subject: guppies and muppies Message-ID: arnold said: > joe pickett, replying to my wondering about whether i can be > described as a GUPPIE at my age: > > Maybe you're a muppie, which according to AHD3 is > > A middle-aged or mature professional person, especially one > considered to be affluent, ambitious, and trendy. We could always try to introduce prenasalized (and prelabialized?) consonants into English and call you a "mguppie". (Hanson's top 40 song "Mmmbop" may have planted the seeds of prenazalization in English.) Or you could be a "gumpie", as in "I'm gumpie, dammit." Lynne, mistress of stupid pop culture references From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Wed Aug 16 17:24:05 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 10:24:05 -0700 Subject: guppies and muppies Message-ID: lynne murphy, bereft of kosher dills on the sussex downs: We could always try to introduce prenasalized (and prelabialized?) consonants into English and call you a "mguppie". (Hanson's top 40 song "Mmmbop" may have planted the seeds of prenazalization in English.) Or you could be a "gumpie", as in "I'm gumpie, dammit." GUMPIE has a nice geezery feel to it. i'll try and see if i can't encourage its use. as for prenasalization, lots of american speakers already have it, in [mbai] for 'BYE (GOODBYE) and [Nke] for 'KAY (OK). i'd imagine these pronunciations haven't made it into the dictionaries of american english. (i recall geoff pullum's astonishment, and pleasure, when on his first visit to ohio state he heard the department secretary use both of these in a single utterance.) as for hanson, it hadn't occurred to me to listen to them, as opposed to looking at them. but i suppose that eye candy can have other uses. arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), tying several old threads on to this drifting one From AAllan at AOL.COM Wed Aug 16 18:02:31 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 14:02:31 EDT Subject: New term: S2B Message-ID: Full text at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2528784.html?tag=pt.excite.cinews..ne2528 784 (- Allan Metcalf) VerticalNet CEO wants to follow AOL's footsteps By Rachel Konrad Staff Writer, CNET News.com August 15, 2000, 1:15 p.m. PT VAIL, Colo.--In his first public remarks since a management restructuring in late July, VerticalNet chairman Mark Walsh showered praise on the company's new CEO--former Amazon.com president Joe Galli. He also introduced yet another online commerce acronym: S2B. . . . . Walsh didn't necessarily simplify VerticalNet's message when he introduced a new acronym today to describe the company: S2B, or supplier to business. Walsh said he dislikes the B2B moniker because it implies a cadre of large companies that use the Internet to demand volume discounts from smaller suppliers. Business-to-business marketplaces typically focus on driving down procurement costs rather than forging relationships with suppliers, he said. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 16 17:57:44 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 13:57:44 -0400 Subject: request Message-ID: Laurence Horn writes: >>>>> I've come across "guppie" more often than any of these except possibly "buppie" and of course "yippie", which is not a "yuppie" spin-off. Yappie? Yeepie? Scuppie? I'll take your word for it. [...] {{David}} Barnhart wrote: >[yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] <<<<< Of From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 16 18:11:07 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:11:07 +0100 Subject: bread and butter pickles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: (off-list) At 2:35 PM +0100 16/8/00, Lynne Murphy wrote: > >The pickles I've bought in a jar here are labelled "dill cucumbers", but >they taste like bread and butter pickles to me. I assume that the term >is American, Personally, I never heard of them. > since we seem to have many more varieties of pickled cukes >than the British do (who seem to have gherkins, and things that are >called 'dill' but don't taste like dill). Yeah, but they pickle *everything* here. > >Lynne, who misses kosher dills You might want to try an 'ethnic' shop. I don't know if there are any in Brighton, but the next time you're in London you might want to try. Here in Edinburgh, we have a place called Valvona & Crolla that sells kosher dills, amongst a plethora of other things (I vaguely remember some Hebraic script on the jar, to boot). I'm sure there's some place like that in your neck of the woods. -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 16 07:05:52 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:05:52 +0800 Subject: Fwd: Re: request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ah. I \thought/ that's what you meant by "Of", but I wasn't sure. This ellipsis stuff can be tricky. L At 2:52 PM -0400 8/16/00, Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com wrote: >I blew it. I started to say something like "Of course, Barnhart didn't say >'yippie' was a spinoff of 'yuppie', but rather that the reverse may have >been true." Then I decided that that wasn't worth pointing out and tried to >abort the message, but wound up sending it instead. Bleah. Sorry. > >-- Mark > > > > >Laurence Horn on 08/16/2000 02:29:44 AM > >To: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM >cc: >Subject: Fwd: Re: request > > >Of? Could you expand on that a bit? > >L > From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 16 19:03:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:03:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: On 5 Feb. 1992 Nancy L. Dray posted the following song to the LINGUIST List. It appeared in the next day's issue, #3.117, and can be found in the List's archive at http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-117.html#4: Since the topic of Proto-World, etc., has come up once again on Linguist, and apparently some new articles have appeared, I can no longer resist the urge to post the following parody lyrics; they are, after all, designed not entirely as frivolous entertainment but also to comment, albeit satirically, on certain trends and recent publicity. I wrote this last spring to entertain a gathering of University of Chicago linguists (Goodspeed Day, for those familiar with our local customs), and I later sent a copy, along with a brief letter concerning the value and continued vitality of traditional methodologies, to The Atlantic Monthly in response to an article by Robert Wright ("Quest for the Mother Tongue," April 1991) which was part of the last media blitz. Though letter and song never appeared in Atlantic, they did appear in California Linguistic Newsletter (Vol. XXII, No. 2, which along with the previous issue also contained letters written by other linguists). The song will also appear in University of Chicago Working Papers in Linguistics 7. I am indebted to Eric P. Hamp and David Testen for some lines, some rhymes, and much encouragement and inspiration (see additional acknowledgments in forthcoming UCWPL version). I'd be delighted to receive comments, extra verses, and other linguistic parodies if anyone cares to send any. Likewise any suggestions of where this might be published (if it should be). You are welcome to pass this on, perform it, etc., as long as it is appropriately attributed to me and the copyright information and some way of contacting me are included. I would also very much appreciate hearing word of the song's travels--and a thousand blessings (plus reimbursement) to anyone who sends me a tape of this actually being performed! If you would like a nicely printed copy (i.e., including the typographical flourishes I had to take out for e-mail), please contact me. Thanks! Here goes: _The Very Model for Historical Comparison_ (Copyright 1991 Nancy L. Dray) (to be sung to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Model of a Modern Major-General") I have the very model for historical comparison, For reconstructing languages when data is as rare as in The case of pre-Nostratic (or perhaps it's post-Atlantean-- I always have preferred a task whose compass is Gargant'ian); For I know all the mythologic functions Dumezilian, And I can trace our species back to ancestors reptilian; In all, I seek the broadest view, for by my ideology The details are just residue left over from typology. Chorus: The details are just residue left over from typology, The details are just residue left over from typology, The details are just residue left over from typo-polo-gy. Thus for all forms of pedantry I offer up this medicine: The weighty methodology of old we'll have to jettison. To link the tongues of everyone from Hottentot to Saracen, We'll need another model for historical comparison. Chorus: To link the tongues of everyone from Hottentot to Saracen, We'll need another model for historical comparison. The sticklers and the "splitters" sitting in their ivory edifice Must take the blame for having let the Russians get ahead of us, For if they are so quick to pale when some small detail menaces, How do they ever hope to reach linguistic monogenesis? While they're immersed in Lycian and Lydian and Luwian, I've reconstructed 'water' terms ante- and post-diluvian! I simply use the handbooks that the forms are predigested in And waste no time on learning every language they're attested in. Chorus: He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested in, He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested in, He wastes no time on learning every language they're attested-tested in. So many forms share elements (and meanings if you think a bit); Morphology's impediments I set aside or shrink to fit. Indeed I am quite certain (although others seem to vary some) Mine is the very model for historical comparison. Chorus: He really is quite certain (although others seem to vary some) This is the very model for historical comparison. Now some may say we "lumpers" are just megalocomparative, Displaying our propensity for hyperbolic narrative, But who can match our progress, going speedier and speedier-- Just look at the attention we've been getting in the media(r)! Where fainter hearts are loath to tread, that's where you'll find me wandering, Assembling the parallels the "splitting" clan are squandering; I'm keen to bag the languages they always thought akin to none By stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one. Chorus: He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one, He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into one, He's stepping 'round the finer points and joining them all into into one. There's Basque and Burushaski, let us not forget Sumerian, Or scratchings unidentified on tablets antiquarian; I let no language go astray--'twould just be too embarrassin' And mar my perfect model for historical comparison. Chorus: He lets no language go astray--'twould just be too embarrassin' And mar his perfect model for historical comparison. Nancy L. Dray Department of Linguistics University of Chicago 1010 E. 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 e-mail: dray at sapir.uchicago.edu P.S. In my letter to Atlantic, I followed the song with this brief comment: I sincerely hope that the "weighty methodology of old" will not be jettisoned, for without this ballast historical-comparative linguistics quickly drifts beyond the reach of attested evidence. Far from being a stodgy or barren enterprise, traditional historical-comparative linguistics has demonstrated that bold innovation is not incompatible with methodological rigor. Indeed, it is the scrupulous accounting for detail that often leads to the most startling, unexpected, and far-reaching discoveries, for the demands of methodology both force and enable one to escape one's own preconceptions. NLD From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Wed Aug 16 19:32:20 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 21:32:20 +0200 Subject: Norway's delight Message-ID: The expression "Midnight Sun" is much older in Scandinavia - e.g. the title of a book: "Midnats Solens r?tta och synlige Rum uti Norrlanden" by J. BILBERG, 1695. I suspect that one can find a Latin origin for the term, as the fact that the sun stayed up all night in northern Scandinavia seems to have been known already in antiquity. Jan Ivarsson, Simrishamn, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU Thu Aug 17 02:32:49 2000 From: nee1 at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU (Barbara Need) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 21:32:49 -0500 Subject: absolutely trivial: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve K wrote: >On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > >> True! I'm off the hook! But maybe I'll write a song involving Chomsky >> instead. I think that's even harder to rhyme. > >There's a trance group called boo maga that has a recording called Under >Attack that samples a bunch of Chomsky's political sound bites. > >There's also a song called Noam CHomsky by Karma Covered Apple. > Actually, there is also "Old Man Chomsky", which used to be sung (along with a whole bunch of filk songs for linguists) at the UofC's Goodspeed Day festivities. I would offer to post them, but 1) I would have to find my copies and 2) I might not have permission. I believe "Old Man Chomsky" is by John Goldsmith, but I could very well be wrong. And, for the record, John recently wrote, to the same "possibly recognizable tune" (as Nancy Dary's Hamp song, in case you missed the Tom Lehrer (sp?) reference), a song in honor of Kostas Kazasis, who retired this year. Barbara Need UChicago Linguistics From staczekj at T-BIRD.EDU Thu Aug 17 02:51:00 2000 From: staczekj at T-BIRD.EDU (John Staczek) Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 19:51:00 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I apologize in advance for posting this request. Can someone please tell me how to unsubscribe to the LIST? I'm grateful in advance. John From rkm at SLIP.NET Thu Aug 17 07:11:06 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 00:11:06 -0700 Subject: perspective In-Reply-To: <36.a355d15.26cc9e42@cs.com> Message-ID: Hadn't heard this one before - and obviously had to pass it along. Rima >A mom in Virginia was talking with her four year old son. He >asked her why all their relatives from Wisconsin "talk funny" >and sound like their noses are plugged up. > >"They have a different accent," she explained. "Everybody >talks in different ways. To them, we sound like we talk very >slow, and all our words are d-r-a-w-n out." > >His eyes got big, and he whispered seriously, "You mean they >hear funny, too?" From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 17 09:15:09 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 02:15:09 -0700 Subject: request Message-ID: I thought *puppie* was the offspring of yuppie. --- Barnhart wrote: > bubbie .... black yuppie > Chuppie .... Chinese yuppie > dumpie .... downwardly mobile middle-aged > professional > gruppie ..... environmentally-conscious yuppie > huppie ..... hippy yuppie > juppie ..... Another word for buppie > nuppie ..... nonworking urban professional > puppie ..... pretentious yuppie > Rumpie ..... rural yuppie > scuppie ..... yuppie sensitive to social issues > skippie ..... school kid with income and purchasing > power > suppie ..... Southern yuppie > woopie .....well-off older person > Yappie ... young arctic professional > yeepie ... Youthful energetic elderly person > [yippie .... the possible father of Yuppie] > Yumpie .... another name for Yuppie > Zuppie .... zestful upscale people in their prime > > The source .... _The Barnhart New Words Concordance_ > (electronic > edition)!!! > > Regards, > David > > David K. Barnhart, Editor > The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] > barnhart at highlands.com > www.highlands.com/Lexik > > "Necessity obliges us to neologize." > Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From emckean at ENTERACT.COM Thu Aug 17 09:19:14 2000 From: emckean at ENTERACT.COM (emckean at ENTERACT.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 04:19:14 -0500 Subject: The Coiner of DRIB Message-ID: This is to save Barry needless work when he starts taking on Internet acronyms & initialisms. I am not ruling out the possibility of simultaneous independent coinages. Erin McKean editor at verbatimmag.com ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 11:34:42 -0400 From: lorilynb at mindspring.com To: emckean at enteract.com Subject: Re: Re: DUMB QUESTIONS Erin, Sure! I love words. I also coined the word "weboneer" in a book in 1996 (meaning web pioneer), but no one uses it. But someone DID take the domain name! Lorilyn Bailey emckean at enteract.com wrote: > I cut my email where I asked her permission to forward her email from the PUBLISH-L list to ADS-L. --ERin On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Lorilyn Bailey wrote: > Yes, I invented DRIB ("Don't Read If Busy") several years ago on the PMA > list in response to people who complained about off-topic, humorous, or > less-than-vitally-important posts. If you're in a hurry, you can delete or > read DRIBs later. (And let the rest of us enjoy them.) > > It's my major lifetime contribution to Internet society. ;) It's now used > on other lists as well and included in one or two "net lingo" and acronmyn > sites on the Internet. > > Lorilyn Bailey > GuestFinder.com > and author of "The Little Book of Online Romance" > lorilyn at guestfinder.com > > > >In a message dated 00-08-13 01:56:00 EDT, Bettilu Stein Faulkner writes: > > > >> Someone wrote that lurkers shouldn't worry about asking dumb questions. > >> I've been watching for weeks, and have yet figured out what DRIB > >> stands for! > From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 11:05:56 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 07:05:56 EDT Subject: Hellesylt notes Message-ID: Greetings from Hellesylt, Norway. I've been asked to help the stranded Russian submarine. CNN just reported stuff from Trondheim, where I'll be in a day. I respectfully told Wolf Blitzer that I did submarine SANDWICHES. FJORDLING--a breed of pony popular in the Bordfjord area. GLACIER--I saw one yesterday. My Canadian tourist guide called in a glace-ee-er. Someone on CNN called it a glassy-er. It's a glay-sher to me. SAYINGS OF THE VIKINGS THE AUTHENTIC HAVAMAL 92 pages, 99 krone My favorite Viking saying--"Nice hat, eh? Let's discover Canada"--is not here. "The early bird catches the worm" is sort of here. Don't know what Fred Shapiro has. VIKING COOKBOOK 40 pages, 98 krone, www.touristbooks.com Nettle soup, Rusiian beetroot soup, Forest onion soup, Fried Baltic herring, Nowegian cod, Bilberry pancake, Elderflower drink, Warrior's mead, Balder's beer, Cranberry drink, among others. I probably won't internet again until Trondheim, in about two days. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 17 13:35:55 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 14:35:55 +0100 Subject: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's Salon: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html Lynne, your local Salon addict Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 17 13:40:19 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 14:40:19 +0100 Subject: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: I said: > There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's > Salon: > > http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html > > > Lynne, your local Salon addict And I add: P.S. It's a pretty stupid review, which doesn't understand what linguists do, and probably deserves some letters to the editor. From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 17 13:52:48 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 09:52:48 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Cat Faber has generously granted me permission to post here the lyrics of her songs that I mentioned. She says in part: >>>>> Quick news flash--the tune to Oak, Ash and Thorn is given on Digitrad (now www.mudcatcafe.org, I think) as being by Peter Bellamy. Sorry. I would have guessed Fish too; she's done tunes to a lot of Kipling's stuff. I don't think Yogh and Ash and Thorn has been recorded (you know you've been doing this for a while when....). If it has, it's on one of Julia West's Conduit filk tapes, or the new Patchwork CDs by Greg Vose (also of Conduit, but more recently). <<<<< Cat's URL Digi(tal)Trad(ition) is correct. If you want Kipling's lyrics just search on that page for "oak and ash and thorn". Unfortunately the tune is not available there; the page says Recorded by John Roberts and Tony Barrand on Dark Ships in the Forest, Folk Legacy FSI65 Here is Cat's filk of it. Though not a linguist, she's had some contact with our profession! I have printed out a page with the three letters in type as large as I could fit, which I display when singing this song (to non-linguists). >>>>> Yogh and Ash and Thorn TTO "Oak and Ash and Thorn" [words copyright Catherine Faber] Some time between the year fourteen-ought-five and -fifty-one, There was a strange and radical change in spoken English done. These letters all but past recall should not be held in scorn; The rose in May must go the way of Yogh and Ash and Thorn. Yogh and ash and thorn, good sirs, moldering vellum adorn. Here do we see mortality in yogh and ash and thorn. Yogh, you see, resembles a three, a little bit flattened above, And sound denotes so low in the throat as only the Dutch could love. But now is found both letter and sound discarded and forlorn. Remember you are mortal too, like yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) A "b" with a tail, thorn didn't prevail, but though it lost the race, It takes a pair of letters to wear the shoes to take its place. And "a" and "e" an ash will be, when back to back they are borne; Into dark the passing mark of yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) "Vowel shift!" said somebody, miffed, "It's more like a hey or a bransle"* "Letter and sound keep swapping around, and 'hands about go all.'" Oh some were stored and some ignored and some were mangled and torn, Caught up in the rout as vowels fell out with yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) Time must be an enemy, that ever ending brings. Even word-fame cannot be heard, when words are mortal things. Some clever cuss in studying us, some distant future morn, May find us surely strange to her as yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus) Rich and strangely words will change in warpage under use, But why in past it happened so fast, gude gohduh ohnlee knoos** We work the sum of what we become from where and how we are born And hold these three in memory: yogh and ash and thorn. (chorus, if desired) *a bransle is a kind of simple medieval ring dance. The word is pronounced "brawl." I have no idea why, but one does wonder... In addition, a "rout" (I hope I have spelled it correctly) can be "the act of running away from a serious defeat" or "a party". Weird, isn't it? :-) **the middle english (Chaucerian english) for "good god only knows" as closely as I can render it. "gude" has a long u, and the k in knoos should be pronounced. <<<<< I don't have the lyrics to the other songs handy at the moment and will provide them later. -- Mark A. Mandel FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Thu Aug 17 14:07:55 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 10:07:55 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Here are the other two of Cat Faber's linguistic filks that I know of. These lyrics are copied from the album insert to the CD _As Good As Any_ (http://www.sff.net/people/julia.west/filk/asgoodas.htm) and, like those to "Yogh and Ash and Thorn", are posted here by her permission. The other and more recent CD by Echo's Children (= Cat + Callie Hills), _Under the Gripping Beast_, is available from Random Factors (http://random-factors.com/). They don't currently list _As Good As Any_, but it may be available. As should be obvious, I am a fan of Echo's Children! -- Mark Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com FIJAGH! Now, *filking*, on the other hand... http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html ===================== Say Again, Tower (a consideration of the linguistic consequences of time-dilation near the speed of light) Words & music by & copyright by Cat (Catherine) Faber The sky mighty black and the Earth blue and green I flamed out on stellar craft B-17 With never a thought for the future I sought, So here's to the stars and the spacers between (CHORUS) Say again, Tower, the spacers demand; Say again, Tower, we don't understand. Gander your phrase book and try it again And please eighty-six on the slang on this band! Like anyone else with the brains of a bean, I'd read Chaucer and Shakespeare and easily seen How a language could change in a century's range, I just hadn't thought what the changes might mean. With everyone fighting to coin the new phrase The Internet's growth added fuel to the blaze Kids pick up a word they just overheard And spread it worldwide in a matter of days I laughed at the worries that fell on my ears Till the voice of the tower confirmed all our fears, "Say, B-17, how's the verne escadrine?"-- For Pete's sake, I've only been gone twenty years! ============================ They Spoke With Their Hands (originally conceived as a telepath's attempt to explain to a non-telepath what it's like to live with an extra sense) Words & music by & copyright by Cat (Catherine) Faber When I was a youngster, to question, or teach, The dance of our hands was our manner of speech; It was long till I learned that no other could hear The soft sound as the wind touched the curve of their ear. We spoke with our hands and we heard with our eyes, We were rough and silly and gentle and wise But birdsong's a thing no one else understands In a village where everyone speaks with their hands But much as they loved me, I grew in their fears, For I heard around corners their laughter or tears And I couldn't explain, not for all of my care How I gazed on their hearts through no sense they could share. I tried to conceal it, but still I was caught And fear turned to anger; they trusted me not Till I ran from the mob through the cheatgrass and sage Fleeing unseen the bare sound of their rage. I dream of the chance all my dreams to restore Let our hands dance together, build bridges once more But should fear drive out love I will work them no ill Earth be my witness, I miss them still. From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 17 15:20:06 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 11:20:06 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word Message-ID: This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word "Yooper" is discussed. Thought he'd be interested, at least.... Jesse Sheidlower OED From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Thu Aug 17 15:35:39 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 11:35:39 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word Message-ID: And you'll be glad to note that Yooper has been added to AHD4. I wonder who's responsible for that! Joe Pickett jester at PANIX.COM on 08/17/2000 11:20:06 AM Please respond to American Dialect Society To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU cc: (bcc: Joe Pickett/Trade/hmco) Subject: Steve K's favorite word This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word "Yooper" is discussed. Thought he'd be interested, at least.... Jesse Sheidlower OED From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 19:02:59 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 15:02:59 EDT Subject: Fwd: OED Usage: nauseous Message-ID: I'm away from my books right now, but perhaps someone can help this person with her nauseating query. (Maybe she'll join the ADS, too?). --Barry Popik, in Geiranger -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Sara Stewart" Subject: OED Usage: nauseous Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 12:45:36 -0400 Size: 1645 URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 17 19:17:55 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 15:17:55 EDT Subject: Geiranger greetings Message-ID: Greetings from the tiny town of Geiranger, Norway. No town is too small for the world wide web. VILLFINN--this drink has vodka, banana liqueur, and lemon juice. BARKRAKK--3 cl Bacardi, 1 cl Campari, 5 cl citron juice, 5 cl orange juice, ice, orange slice, soda BLYFRI (non-alcoholic)--Sprite, lime, banana. GEIRANGERFJORD SPECIAL--2 cl Bacardi, 1 cl COintreau, 1 cl Galiano, 3 cl citron juice, ice. PARTY DRESSING--I was told that this looks and tastes like Thousand Island Dressing, which is popular here. I've somehow developed a crush on bubbly CNN weathergirl Femi Oke (www.mpce.com/oke.htm)--even turning the channel from Anna Kournikova or Serena Williams tennis matches. Maybe she can help me research "O.K."? From rkm at SLIP.NET Fri Aug 18 02:39:12 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 19:39:12 -0700 Subject: linguistic songs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Fabulous! I will definitely pass it along to the a capella group. Thanks. Rima From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Fri Aug 18 09:33:16 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 04:33:16 -0500 Subject: Long!)Re: review of _vanishing lgs_ Message-ID: Thanks to Lynne Murphy for writing: > There's a review of Nettle & Romaine's _Vanishing Languages_ in today's > Salon: > > http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/17/nettles_romaine/index.html I have just sent a response to Salon. I've added both the review and my response below my signature line. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! P.S.: Duplication of the Salon review here is for the purpose of scholarly discussion. I believe it constitutes 'fair use' of the copyrighted material, as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. ========= Gavin McNett's review in Salon: =========== "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" The number of living languages is shrinking fast -- but does that matter? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Gavin McNett Aug. 17, 2000 | There's a reference in "Vanishing Voices" to a magazine ad that promises instruction in "most of the world's languages" -- a total of 76. That might seem pretty impressive, except that even the lowest estimates put the number of languages in the world at roughly 5,000. That doesn't include dialects or regional variations; it represents the number of bona fide languages spoken in the world, each as complex and distinct as English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. If that seems hard to imagine, it's because the great majority are local tongues such as Rotokas, Sim'algax and Kurux, used by only a handful of people. (There are, for example, fewer than 500 native speakers of Kurux.) These languages are, "Vanishing Voices" explains, disappearing from the world at an astounding rate -- as many as half might become extinct in the next century. A worldwide trend toward language extinction, according to the authors, has been going on ever since Europeans conquered the Americas and began to spread out across Africa, the Pacific and Australia. The trend has been accelerating in recent decades thanks to the global economic juggernaut -- through the leveling of regional distinctions and the ongoing displacement of indigenous populations, and (not least) through the rise of English as the lingua franca of business and commerce. The field of linguistics believes that the shrinking number of languages is a bad thing, but aside from the fact that it means fewer languages to study, and thus less for linguists to do, there is no consensus as to why it's bad -- or what should be done about it. But Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine are not linguists; they're from somewhat more sanguinary, more activist fields (anthropology and English, respectively). And they've taken up language extinction as their cause, claiming that indigenous languages have vital cultural knowledge encoded within them that's being lost to the world forever. "Vanishing Voices" is well-written and engaging, and it makes you feel that something unique and irreplaceable is being lost whenever a language dwindles into oblivion. The book has photos of the last speakers of several languages, including Briton Ned Maddrell, who took the ancient language Manx to his grave in 1974, and Red Thundercloud, the last speaker of Catawba Sioux, who died in 1996. As a book on the science of language, however, "Vanishing Voices" is a bit wacky. The point the authors try the hardest to make is that indigenous languages are somehow associated with biodiversity, and that their extinction is a symptom of the global ecological crisis. Which might be true if you squint at it the right way: Languages, along with flora, fauna and indigenous peoples, are dying out -- and it's no great secret that geocapitalism is the culprit. But is there a genuine, necessary connection between biodiversity and linguistic diversity? The authors never establish one, but they repeat the idea a number of times, coyly and at odd moments, as though they weren't entirely convinced of it themselves. Even if you believe, as Noam Chomsky does, that the ability to learn and use language is innate, it's quite a different thing to say that languages themselves can be "ecological." It's like saying that since sex is innate and natural, so are strip joints and S/M clubs: The basic impulses behind them might be present in all of us, but the forms in which they're expressed depend on all sorts of complex cultural forces. Yet much of the book is tied together by this slender premise. Eventually, Nettle and Romaine's discussion of language tapers off altogether, into a narrative of indigenous peoples' struggle against the forces of globalization, which is important and makes for absorbing reading but isn't what the book purports to be about. But Nettle and Romaine make a pretty good argument that it's easier in some languages than others to conceive of certain useful relationships among things, thanks to classifier systems that organize words into categories (like gender in French and German or the Japanese system of using different words to count differently shaped objects). In the dying Australian language Dyirbal, for instance, there are four categories for nouns, which reveal subtle shared similarities among the words, as well as cultural judgments about the objects to which they refer. "If some members of a set differ in some important way from the others," the authors note, "they are put into another group. Thus, while fish belong to Class I bayi words, the stone fish and gar fish, which are harmful and therefore potentially dangerous, are in the balan class." There is thus no mistaking, for a Dyirbal speaker, that the stonefish is dangerous. "The rationale for the categorization," the authors continue, "tells us something about how Dyirbal people conceive of their social world and interact with it." Other examples follow, including that of a complex calendar system used by Balinese farmers to synchronize irrigation. But here's the hook: The claim that language operates in this fashion goes against the grain of mainstream linguistics, which holds as an article of faith that all languages are basically equivalent in terms of conveying meaning -- that none is better or more efficient than any other. Linguists today have to reiterate this point a lot: Early language researchers once tramped across strange terrain and called the local tongues barbarous and inferior. Nettle and Romaine, instead, make a good showing at demonstrating that there are questions of better and worse regarding language: A language, or a language group, can and often will be superior to all others in its own natural and social environment. But there's still a long way to go to prove that the noun classes in Dyirbal, for example, make any difference in its speakers' consciousness -- in the way they think about fish or anything else. And if linguistics is right that all languages are equivalent, then even after reading "Vanishing Voices" you're still left with a difficult, even untenable question: If most of the world's languages are dying, so what? - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Gavin McNett is a frequent contributor to Salon. ======= Response by Mike Salovesh, submitted to Salon ======== Gavin McNett's review of "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages" fliply opines that "the field of linguistics believes that the shrinking number of languages is a bad thing, but aside from the fact that it means fewer languages to study, and thus less for linguists to do, there is no consensus as to why it's bad . . . " A serious misconception underlies that statement. Linguistics is aimed at understanding the nature of language in general. Many major contributions in linguistic science have been the work of linguists who spoke and analyzed only one language. Conversely, there are many people who handle several languages equally well without knowing anything about linguistics. (Students of linguistics call those people "polyglots", not linguists.) If everyone on earth suddenly started to speak English and all other languages were to disappear, there would still be more work to be done in linguistics than there are linguists to do it. McNett sets up a straw man as a target in place of Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, the authors of "Vanishing Voices". He takes the point of the book to be that linguistic diversity is equivalent to biodiversity, and that geocapitalism is to blame for diminshing both. By saying that the authors are "from somewhat more sanguinary, more activist fields (anthropology and English . . .)" [than linguistics], and in other side shots at the idea of activism, McNett implies that this whole work can be ignored as some kind of activist fantasy. He even tells us that as "a book on the science of language, however, 'Vanishing Voices' is a bit wacky." McNett makes it seem wackier still by pointing to snippets of cultural facts that might be lost if the languages in which they are embedded are lost. There is something curiously interesting in the fact that speakers of Dyirbal, an endangered Australian language, have four classes of nouns, and that the words for nearly all fish fall into a single class. Two kinds of fish, however, are harmful, and the words for those species fall into another class of nouns. That is hardly earthshaking. If (or is it when?) Dyirbal disappears, it would still be useful to know the dangers of the stone fish and gar fish found in the territory where Dyirbal speakers used to live. That vital knowledge could be transmitted in any other language. (After all, "Vanishing Voices", McNett, and I have all passed on that knowledge using English words exclusively.) Suppose that the conceptual separation of gar fish and stone fish from all other fish through the noun classes of Dyirbal were all the world would lose if the language were to disappear. McNett would then be quite right in suggesting that the loss would be no big deal. If McNett had more than the thinnest acquaintance with linguistics and with what linguists do, he might have understood the much more important questions about what we lose when a language disappears. Linguistics begins with description of actual speech events. In the long run, what linguistics tells us about how language works and what language is depends on knowing just what range of behavior is possible in real speech. Linguists aren't free to manipulate or invent ideas and logics any way they choose: they limit themselves to describing and analyzing what real people actually say in some real language. When the world loses a specific language which never was spoken by any large number of people, the loss might put a philosopher in mind of the Talmudic dictum that "who kills a man destroys an entire universe". A dedicated believer in majority rule might not care at all. A linguist, however, is much more likely to think of John Donne and say "any language's death diminishes me". By definition, every language is unique. Part of that uniqueness is found in unique combinations of sounds, unique ways of arranging those sounds into meaningful utterances, and unique ways of slicing the reality of the world around us into significant categories. Those unique properties are what we lose when a language disappears. Once a language is lost, its uniqueness can't be duplicated or reconstructed by any exercise of the imagination. McNett ends his review by asking "If most of the world's languages are dying, so what?" The most important answer is that each loss makes it that much more difficult to understand the nature of language in general. When we lose a language, we lose a valuable and unique handle on the limits and the extensions of what we can know about language. That's why linguists agree that losing any language is a bad thing. -- Mike Salovesh From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Fri Aug 18 11:27:48 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:27:48 +0100 Subject: salon: Ms & vanishing lgs Message-ID: Since Mike Salovesh posted his response to Salon, I'll post mine as well (below). In other Salon news, I've been reading the issues I missed while traveling a few weeks ago, and there's one on attitudes toward "Ms.": http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/07/27/ms/ And readers responded a few days later with: http://www.salon.com/letters/daily/2000/07/31/ms/ Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 My response to McNett's review of _Vanishing Languages_: Gavin McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's _Vanishing Languages_ does little more than reveal McNett's ignorance about and hostility toward the field of linguistics. After proclaiming what "the field of linguistics believes" (as if any field is a monolithic intelligence), he claims that the authors of the book are "from more sanguinary, more political fields." Considering that the most famous linguist in the world, Noam Chomsky, is also one of America's greatest political thinkers, this is a strange claim. Furthermore, the Linguistic Society of America and other linguistics organizations have taken on language extinction as a major (political) issue in the past few years. But what makes it even stranger is the fact that it's false: Romaine is on the faculty of Linguistics and Philology at Oxford. Nettle is an anthropologist with linguistic interests, who had previously authored a book on linguistic diversity. McNett doubts their claims that the loss of linguistic diversity entails the loss of cultural and cognitive diversity, and it is true that some of their claims were controversial in the linguistic mainstream of the 20th century. However, most of the languages that will be lost in the next century are unwritten languages. When they go, they're gone. There will be no written texts or DNA samples through which they can be recovered. The fear that we might lose cultural knowledge (say, a South American grandma's home remedy for skin cancer or a song that puts Shakespeare's sonnets to shame) is as well-founded as the fear that the extinction of plantlife might involve the loss of a potential pharmaceutical. We don't actually know that any undocumented, unprotected plants are waiting to solve our problems, just as we don't know what we'll lose if we lose most of the world's languages. What we do know is that the problem has been created by political and economic imperialism, and those of us who effect and benefit from our own language's dominance should take some responsibility for mitigating this loss--whether by providing support for education in indigenous languages, encouraging bilingualism, or by using current technology to ensure that the languages are recorded for posterity. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 12:02:35 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 08:02:35 EDT Subject: Andalsnes, Trondheim & the bicycle lift Message-ID: Greetings from Andalsnes, Norway. This is from TRONDHEIM, GUIDE 2000 (I'll be there tomorrow, today was the troll wall): Pg. 5: The bicycle lift Trampe So far, Trondheim is the first city in the world with a lift specifically designed for cyclists. (Sheidlower has a mean cycling reputation--ed.) Pg. 55: Vertshuset Tavern The building has been a tavern since 1739. Previously located in the centre of Trondheim, it has now been moved to Trondelag Folk Museum. (...) rommegrot (sour-cream porridge) spekemat (cured meat) On Tuesdays we serve genuine Trondelag klubb, the traditional potato dumplings of the region. (Attached is...is...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Abuzz Subject: New York Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 01:29:05 -0400 (EDT) Size: 2194 URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 18 14:39:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:39:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: Cat Faber corrects me on the sequence of Echo's Children's CDs: >>>>> Actually, we put out _Under the Gripping Beast_ first and _As Good As Any_ second. Yours pedantically, Cat <<<<< -- Mark From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Fri Aug 18 14:58:21 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:58:21 -0400 Subject: linguistic songs Message-ID: The 1992 email address of Nancy Dray, author of "The Very Model for Historical Comparison", is obsolete. She writes to me as follows: >>>>> Thanks for writing me, and for putting my song back into circulation! I'd be delighted if you'd post my updated address on ADS-L as a follow-up, and I hope anyone who responded by sending mail to my old sapir address will resend it. My correct, permanent address is n-dray-7 at alumni.uchicago.edu (this is just an alias; I can set it to forward mail to me wherever I go). <<<<< -- Mark From stevek at SHORE.NET Fri Aug 18 16:30:39 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:30:39 -0400 Subject: Steve K's favorite word In-Reply-To: <200008171520.LAA05869@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > This month's issue of Harper's has an article about a > small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the effect > on it of a big movie shoot coming to town. The word > "Yooper" is discussed. > > Thought he'd be interested, at least.... How very cool; I'll have to check it out. (I'm typing at you from Michigan as we speak.) --- Steve K. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 16:32:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:32:50 EDT Subject: Panda Bread & Svele Message-ID: Greetings again from Andalsnes. There is a computer in the hotel again (but this one isn't free). PANDA BREAD--A bakery here serves this. You get a bag that says "Panda Brod" and has the panda symbol of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund). The recipe for the bread is given (in Norwegian). Supposedly, some of the money goes to the WWF. This is probably on the WWF web site, but I don't have time to check. SVELE--The fjord ferries serve this. "The Golden Route" handout has the recipe and states on pg. 25: SVELE Svele, resembling small, thick, sweet "pancakes," are a traditional local specialty, often made, together with coffee, for guests. WIENERBROD--A "Danish" here is called Vienna Bread! TROLL BURGER--One restaurant in Andalsnes serves this. It's hamburger, lettuce, and fries. ELK'S FAVORITE--What my hotel (Grand Hotell Bellevue) calls "forest berries warmed in peppermint syrup, vanilla ice cream, liqueur." POKEMON PIZZA--Ham & cheese pizza, as served on the kids' menu at one place down the block. TARZAN PIZZA--Pepperoni & cheese pizza, from the same kids' menu. From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 18 17:32:28 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 10:32:28 -0700 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, that as the meaning of words change, people become frustrated and angry that they have lost the means of expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring any bells with anyone? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 18 06:15:30 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 14:15:30 +0800 Subject: changes in word meanings In-Reply-To: <20000818173228.14027.qmail@web1301.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, that >as the meaning of words change, people become >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means of >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring any >bells with anyone? > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. :) From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 18 19:19:16 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 12:19:16 -0700 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: --- Laurence Horn wrote: > At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: > >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, > that > >as the meaning of words change, people become > >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means > of > >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm > >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring > any > >bells with anyone? > > > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. :) The quote I'm looking for was brought to mind by the responses of Mike Salovesh and Lynne Murphy to Gavin McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's _Vanishing Languages_ in Salon. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 21:13:48 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:13:48 EDT Subject: Coasteering Message-ID: We discussed several adventure sports last year after the "canyoning" tragedy, but I didn't see "coasteering" in the archives. "Coasteering" is jumping off a cliff, with a helmet wet suit, and boots on. It's a combination of cliff diving and mountain climbing and probably a few others. A Google.com check shows it's existed since at least 1986. I don't have my Barnhart New Words handy. There are a lot of opportunities for coasteering here among the fjords, but I haven't seen it offered. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 18 21:19:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 17:19:50 EDT Subject: "Creative Economy" (formerly, New Economy) Message-ID: There's an article on the "Creative Economy" in today's CBS Marketwatch. I spotted it just now on AOL News. The Creative Economy is something just beyond the New Economy. From tcf at MACOMB.COM Sat Aug 19 04:06:49 2000 From: tcf at MACOMB.COM (Tim Frazer) Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 23:06:49 -0500 Subject: changes in word meanings Message-ID: What is SALON? ----- Original Message ----- From: James Smith To: Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 2:19 PM Subject: Re: changes in word meanings > --- Laurence Horn wrote: > > At 10:32 AM -0700 8/18/00, James Smith wrote: > > >I read a quote from someone that said, in effect, > > that > > >as the meaning of words change, people become > > >frustrated and angry that they have lost the means > > of > > >expressing themselves. Of course the quote I'm > > >looking for is much more succinct. Does this ring > > any > > >bells with anyone? > > > > > What an awful, pompous, artificial thing to say. > :) > > The quote I'm looking for was brought to mind by the > responses of Mike Salovesh and Lynne Murphy to Gavin > McNett's review of Suzanne Romaine and Daniel Nettle's > _Vanishing Languages_ in Salon. > > > > ===== > James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything > SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued > jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively > |or slowly and cautiously. > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. > http://im.yahoo.com/ From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Sat Aug 19 04:41:06 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 00:41:06 -0400 Subject: Mark Mandel/Dragon Systems USA is out of the office. Message-ID: I will be out of the office from 08/18/2000 until 08/25/2000. I will respond to your message when I return... unless it's spam. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 19 06:48:48 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 02:48:48 EDT Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the top story right below the news headlines. (Who reads the JEWISH BAKERS' VOICE I wonder?-ed.) From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 12:41:14 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 08:41:14 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008190649.e7J6nN522198@listserv.cc.uga.edu> from "Bapopik@AOL.COM" at Aug 19, 2000 02:48:48 AM Message-ID: > (Who reads the JEWISH BAKERS' VOICE I wonder?-ed.) Hey, I gave 'em your name! They were _really excited_ to hear about the Jewish Bakers' Voice. JTS From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Aug 19 13:17:08 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 14:17:08 +0100 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: > From: Bapopik at AOL.COM > Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the > top story right below the news headlines. More specifically, it's at: http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/081900oed-profile.html It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... Lynne, who's always had a thing for Michael Palin Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 14:51:12 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 10:51:12 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: from "Lynne Murphy" at Aug 19, 2000 02:17:08 PM Message-ID: > > It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it > compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... I thought, "cool," and then my wife came down and said, "Who's Michael Palin?" Giving rise to some mean thoughts from me. JTS From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 19 16:10:22 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:10:22 EDT Subject: Brain Stack Message-ID: Greetings from Trondheim and a bizarre keyboard. Today?s NY POST has this sports headline... "Brain Stack" gives Hill Mental Powers Glenallen Hill takes the brain supplement pills Cartilade Sport, Brain Elevate, Phosphatidyl Serine, Glutamine, and Tyrosine. Me, I take those Ritter chocolate squares. Does Barnhardt or Fred Shapiro or "Michael Palin" have BRAIN STACK? From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:04:43 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 09:04:43 -0700 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: barry popik announces: Jesse Sheidlower is in the New York Times, 8-19-2000. See www.nytimes.com. It's the top story right below the news headlines. in the northern california edition, it's right under a photo of the melted north pole. just one more amazing event, i guess. so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From gscole at ARK.SHIP.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:47:49 2000 From: gscole at ARK.SHIP.EDU (GSCole) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:47:49 -0400 Subject: "Creative Economy" (formerly, New Economy) Message-ID: Merely a quick note. Some sources credit Ralph Waldo Emerson with "A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence," as found in -Aristocracy-. I don't have that source at hand, so I can't comment; don't know the usage intended by Emerson, nor the one of CBS Marketwatch. George S. Cole gscole at ark.ship.edu Shippensburg University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 16:48:55 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:48:55 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > It's an important article because it gives Jesse's age, and a flattering one because it > compares him to a young Michael Palin. What an ego-stroke that must be... > > Lynne, who's always had a thing for Michael Palin (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become much more interesting with age. mk) _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Sat Aug 19 16:59:17 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:59:17 +0100 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: > (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become > much more interesting with age. > mk) > _____________________________________________ > Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu > Department of English (765) 285-8410 > Ball State University I think you've just insulted Jesse! Lynne From jester at PANIX.COM Sat Aug 19 16:59:05 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:59:05 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008191604.JAA12372@Turing.Stanford.EDU> from "Arnold Zwicky" at Aug 19, 2000 09:04:43 AM Message-ID: > so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so > over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about > this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish > it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've > become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an > alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to > finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use to modify things that do not normally take modification. There can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of "fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or the like. The positive-rejoinder "so" can be confused with this newer one; for example, I have a quote from _Spin City_ where a beautiful woman applies for a job and says something flattering about Michael J. Fox, and he replies, "You are _so_ hired". This is the new one; it does not contrast with an earlier or implied state of not-hiredness. The earliest example I know of is from 1988, but I'd welcome an antedating! JTS From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 17:06:33 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:06:33 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > (But surely not for the *young* Michael Palin? Seems to me he's become > > much more interesting with age. > > mk) > > > I think you've just insulted Jesse! > > Lynne Er, well, let me try this: I haven't, because of a crucial distinction in definiteness expressed by the determiners involved. In using the phrase "a young Michael Palin", the author asked us to imagine a set of similar but, crucially, nonidentical individuals. I suggested that "the young Michael Palin", the individual who is a specific reference point for this prototypical set, had the quality of being eminently unremarkable, a quality not necessarily shared by *any* of the other individuals in the set, as per prototype theory. -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 19 17:09:18 2000 From: mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU (Mai Kuha) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 12:09:18 -0500 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times/"so" In-Reply-To: <200008191659.MAA15626@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Aug 2000 jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do > believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use > to modify things that do not normally take modification. There > can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of > "fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or > the like. (...) So far, it seems to me that the new SO occurs only after an auxiliary. Any counter-evidence, anyone? -Mai _____________________________________________ Mai Kuha mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu Department of English (765) 285-8410 Ball State University From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Aug 20 05:07:20 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 22:07:20 -0700 Subject: On gen-X "so" In-Reply-To: <399DFB6F00006FE6@phobos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: As with "way", discussed earlier, the particular frequency and collocations seem distinctly gen-X, but may be merely an evolutionary extension, hard to draw a sharp line between. In some cases, putting "very" after it renders the construction more mainstream, at least to these jaded ears. Rudy From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 20 12:46:39 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 08:46:39 EDT Subject: Fwd: Jesse's book from Word a day. Message-ID: FYI. Someone read the NY TImes article and then my Amazon review of Jesse's book, which stated that Jesse's at the OED and not at Random House. --Barry Popik (I'll tell her to wait for the movie. There is an OED movie, surely...) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Mary Margaret Flynn" Subject: Jesse's book from Word a day. Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 19:40:04 -0700 Size: 2549 URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sun Aug 20 13:08:20 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 09:08:20 EDT Subject: Appreciation Fatigue Message-ID: Greetings again from Trondheim. I'll be in Sweden tomorrow. -------------------------------------------------------- APPRECIATION FATIGUE I think we're all sick of fatigues. I'm fatigued at Clinton fatigue. The FINANCIAL TIMES, Weekend August 19-20, pg. 24, cols. 1-4, has "appreciation fatigue." The story is: _Japanese find aid diplomacy_ _fails to generate goodwill_ Beijing shrugs off Tokyo's largesse with attack of "appreciation fatigue" -------------------------------------------------------- TRONDHEIM BICYCLE LIFT I saw the Trondheim bicycle lift. It's interesting. It states: The bicycle lift Trampe was opened September 1993. This is the first bicycle lift in the world. www.novit.no/dahls/Trampe/index.html e-mail: jwanvik at online.no From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 20 02:27:35 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 10:27:35 +0800 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: <200008191659.MAA15626@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: At 12:59 PM -0400 8/19/00, jester at PANIX.COM wrote: > > so, jesse, what have you found out about 'gen-X SO' (as in 'i'm so >> over that topic')? geoff pullum and i have had to say a bit about >> this SO in our work on auxiliary reduction, but only to distinguish >> it from the degree adverbial SO that modifies adjectives ('you've >> become so famous!') and the positive rejoinder SO that's an >> alternative to TOO and emphatic NOT (A: you aren't going to >> finish that article. B: i am SO/TOO going to finish it!). > >Well, what was awkwardly quoted in the article is what I do >believe: what distinguishes this "so" from others is is use >to modify things that do not normally take modification. There >can be degrees of famousness, but there can't be degrees of >"fifteen minutes ago" (e.g. "That's so fifteen minutes ago!") or >the like. > >The positive-rejoinder "so" can be confused with this newer one; >for example, I have a quote from _Spin City_ where a beautiful >woman applies for a job and says something flattering about >Michael J. Fox, and he replies, "You are _so_ hired". This is >the new one; it does not contrast with an earlier or implied >state of not-hiredness. > >The earliest example I know of is from 1988, but I'd welcome >an antedating! > Along with its modifying of non-modifiables (as in not only "You are SO hired" but "You are SO fired", which I'm sure I've heard on Friends at least once), there's also the striking (at least to me) ability of the gen-X SO to take negated adjectives within its scope: That is SO not cool. Needless to say, normal intensifying adverbs (e.g. VERY) can't do this, but as far as I know neither does intensifying WAY (way cool/#way not cool). On another point, at the very end of the wonderful Times profile (just to the right of the facial encounter from--what movis IS it from, can anyone say?), Jesse describes--(or is quoted as describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. Larry From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Sun Aug 20 15:11:39 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 11:11:39 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Laurence Horn wrote: > describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational > lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and > probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical > items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the > early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own > recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational > lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. If anyone is interested in the term's history, the OED indicates that _disambiguation_ was coined by Jeremy Bentham or his smarter brother, George (alright, nephew). The OED's earliest citation is dated 1963, from the journal _Language_. Here's an earlier one I have found: 1960 Jerry A. Fodor in _Journal of Philosophy_ 57: 503 One disambiguates an utterance by adding to the context of the utterance. Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From sagehen at SLIC.COM Sun Aug 20 15:48:55 2000 From: sagehen at SLIC.COM (sagehen) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 11:48:55 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Fred Shapiro writes: > >Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the >sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). Oh, that is SO day before yesterday! A. Murie From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Sun Aug 20 16:23:20 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 18:23:20 +0200 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Sun Aug 20 16:49:15 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 18:49:15 +0200 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: > It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a > singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history > professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary > of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the > turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is > still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Sorry, I got this backward. I meant to write that Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says that the noun went from plural to singular around the turn of the twentieth century. Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Mon Aug 21 00:04:28 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 02:04:28 +0200 Subject: Norway's delight - Midnight Sun Message-ID: Here's a quote from the ENCYCLOP?DIA BRITANNICA: DICUIL, fl. 825, Ireland monk, grammarian, and geographer whose work is important to the history of science and is a testament to Irish learning in the 9th century....Completed in 825, his De mensura orbis terrae ("Concerning the Measurement of the World") contains the earliest mention of Irish hermits having visited Iceland (795), where they marveled at the midnight sun.... Dicuil quotes from, or refers to, 30 Greek and Latin writers as well as to the poet Sedulius, his Irish contemporary. The best edition of De mensura was made by G. Parthey in 1870. This goes to show the the phenomenon was known and certainly got a name very early. Jan Ivarsson, Simrishamn, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 21 01:01:51 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:01:51 -0400 Subject: Norway's delight - Midnight Sun In-Reply-To: <000a01c00b03$66f95e80$d3a6b2c3@janivars> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Jan Ivarsson wrote: > This goes to show the the phenomenon was known and certainly got a > name very early. You may well be right that the midnight sun got a name very early, but nothing in the Britannica entry you quote "goes to show" that. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Aug 21 04:39:11 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 21:39:11 -0700 Subject: SO not cool In-Reply-To: <39A0A9050000001D@deimos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Larry, In your fieldwork in TVland, have you encountered any examples of SO VERY (not) cool/1950s/fired ? Rudy From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Mon Aug 21 10:39:56 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 11:39:56 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are In-Reply-To: <002001c00ac3$08d12a80$5306f9c1@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >It is often said that the United States went from being a plural to a >singular noun during or straight after the Civil War. An American history >professor I know tells me that this is a fact. Merriam Webster's Dictionary >of English Usage says that the noun went from singular to plural around the >turn of the twentieth century, except in Britain where the United States is >still a plural noun. Has anyone looked into this question? Harry Turtledove, in his afterword in _How Few Remain_ refers to the change from plural to singular with regard to the Civil War. Judging from his other novels, I would suspect that he has actually researched this or at least come across appropriate evidence in his research. Although his linguistic facts are sometimes just a hair off the mark. You can probably find him on the web or through his publisher. As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is losing its consistency in practice, I think. --Aaron -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Aug 21 10:46:50 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 06:46:50 -0400 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: Paul et al. I heard Allen Walker Read give a wonderful paper (like all his papers) on "United States" some years back at an ANS or ADS meeting. He was focusing more on the inhabitant-adjectival uses over the years, but may well have touched on the singular/plural thing. I don't know if the paper was published, but I'd check the index for "Names", the journal of ANS, and also American Speech. Frank Abate From paulfrank at WANADOO.FR Mon Aug 21 13:38:06 2000 From: paulfrank at WANADOO.FR (Paul Frank) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 15:38:06 +0200 Subject: It's, like, still spreading Message-ID: Like It or Not, 'Like' Is Probably Here to Stay If Al Gore had followed his mistaken belief that a politician should be a man of the people, he would have addressed Los Angeles in its own language. "Together," he might have said, "we're going to, like, take this ticket, like, all the way across America to, like, the White House this November." The rest of this article from today's LA Times can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/living/20000820/t000078434.html Cheers, Paul ________________________________________ Paul Frank Business, financial and legal translation >From German, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese into English Thollon-les-Memises, 74500 Evian, France paulfrank at wanadoo.fr From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 21 02:47:22 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 10:47:22 +0800 Subject: SO not cool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 9:39 PM -0700 8/20/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Larry, > > In your fieldwork in TVland, have you encountered any examples of > > SO VERY (not) cool/1950s/fired ? > >Rudy No, I never have. Actually, "so very cool" might have occurred without my processing it as an instance of what we're calling Gen-X 'so'. I could imagine, for example, "I'm feeling so very tired". But the others, where only the new 'so' could be involved, I'd definitely have noticed. larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 21 16:56:18 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 12:56:18 EDT Subject: Stockholm snippets Message-ID: Greetings from Stockholm, Sweden. We stopped at a highway rest stop before town, and there were two pregnancy magazines on the rack (and advertised outside the shop). Both showed the famous VANITY FAIR "Demi Moore" pregnancy pose. However, for one cover, the woman was very visibly naked. People seem to wear clothes in Stockholm, thankfully. EURO CREEP--Not "Euro trash," although they certainly CAN be creeps. FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 15, col. 2: "The news is another example of 'euro creep,' the slow adoption of the euro as a parallel currency in Britain..." NAME AND SHAME--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 200, pg. 2, col. 4: "...the OECD's 'name and shame' list of 35 offshore tax havens published in June." POLITICAL HYGEINE--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 1, col. 4: "Such a move would represent 'political hygeine,' he said." (Germany's Gerhard Schroeder on banning neo-Nazi groups.) RANDLORD--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 2000, pg. 13, col. 1, obituary for South Africa's Harry Oppenheimer. EUPHENOMICS--THE ECONOMIST, August 19th, pg. 72, uses "euphenomics" (economics+ euphemism) for a happy spin on the dismal science. FALUN SAUSAGE--THE BERGSLAG DIAGONAL-580 KM OF EXPERIENCES IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GUSTAV VASA (1993), pg. 69: "The Falun sausage is a well-known local specialty." TUNNBRODS--Tunnel bread? A hot dog in a wrap sandwich, available here in Stockholm. The subway--50 years old--is "T" for tunnel. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Mon Aug 21 17:05:02 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 18:05:02 +0100 Subject: Stockholm snippets Message-ID: Barry said: > NAME AND SHAME--FINANCIAL TIMES, 21 August 200, pg. 2, col. 4: "...the OECD's 'name and > shame' list of 35 offshore tax havens published in June." This article is following on the heels of a much more publicized "name and shame" campaign--against alleged pedophiles, organized by The News of the World (tabloid) and resulting in a fair amount of violence in the housing estates of nearby Portsmouth. At the moment "name and shame" is pretty much synonymous with the anti-pedophile campaign. Lynne From millerk at NYTIMES.COM Tue Aug 22 13:17:30 2000 From: millerk at NYTIMES.COM (Kathleen Miller) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 09:17:30 -0400 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck with a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as "get out of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, or is there another name for it? Kathleen E. Miller Research Assistant to William Safire The New York Times "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jester at PANIX.COM Tue Aug 22 14:32:32 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 10:32:32 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times In-Reply-To: from "Laurence Horn" at Aug 20, 2000 10:27:35 AM Message-ID: > Along with its modifying of non-modifiables (as in not only "You are > SO hired" but "You are SO fired", which I'm sure I've heard on > Friends at least once), there's also the striking (at least to me) > ability of the gen-X SO to take negated adjectives within its scope: > That is SO not cool. Needless to say, normal intensifying adverbs > (e.g. VERY) can't do this, but as far as I know neither does > intensifying WAY (way cool/#way not cool). e.g., 2000 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 30 Apr. (Seven Days section) 3/7 The book is so not dead. It's, like, totally awesome. 1997 New York Mag. 25 Aug. 152/3 Napoleons are so not fun to eat. > On another point, at the very end of the wonderful Times profile > (just to the right of the facial encounter from--what movis IS it > from, can anyone say?), Jesse describes--(or is quoted as > describing--DISAMBIGUATE as a verb "mostly used in computational > lexicography". Is it really that restricted? Generative, and > probably pre-generative, linguists have been disambiguating lexical > items and syntactic structures under that name since at least the > early 1960's, judging by the OED cite from _Language_ and my own > recollections within the field, and I'd like to think computational > lexicographers still make up a minority of its wielders. I think this is best attributed to my "without a second's hesitation". It is certainly more widespread than computational lexicography. JTS From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Tue Aug 22 15:35:36 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:35:36 -0400 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times Message-ID: How about "indubitable," especially for the sound of it that makes sense? I was told by the late Prof. Donald B. Sands (circa 1963, in an Old English course!) that's what the pigeons are saying. If linguistic change applies here, I wonder what the pigeons are saying 37 years later. T.M.P. THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY, lexicographer since 1964 Latest work: "The User's(tm) Webster," Lexicography, Inc., 2000 ISBN 0-920865-03-8 / utpbooks at utpress.utoronto.ca ======================= Fred Shapiro wrote: > >> Personally, "disambiguate" is my second favorite word -- I just like the > sound of it. (My first favorite is "antepenultimate"). > > Fred Shapiro > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Fred R. Shapiro Editor > Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS > and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, > Yale Law School forthcoming > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu **** ANY PRICE ON THIS? **** (tmp) From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 16:41:51 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 17:41:51 +0100 Subject: vanishing languages/salon Message-ID: For those of you who were interested in the review of _Vanishing Languages_ on salon.com, the letters have now been posted. http://salon.com/letters/daily/2000/08/22/nettles_romaine/index.html They only chose 2 letters on the topic, one from Alaska Native Lgs Ctr, and one from a guy who believes that preserving languages is a way to stir up ethnic tensions. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Tue Aug 22 04:55:51 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 12:55:51 +0800 Subject: Semantic Shift? In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000822091059.0092ec20@mailgate.nytimes.com> Message-ID: At 9:17 AM -0400 8/22/00, Kathleen Miller wrote: >Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck >with a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as >"get out of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, >or is there another name for it? > > >Kathleen E. Miller >Research Assistant to William Safire >The New York Times > >"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with >the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible >to the eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery When a word or phrase changes meaning while retaining its form, this would generally be described as an instance of semantic change. Some scholars would use "shift" in a narrower way to denote one variety of semantic change. Thus, for example, the change of GIRL to mean 'young female human' instead of the earlier 'young human' is an instance of semantic narrowing, the change of BIRD to mean 'avian creature' instead of the earlier 'young avian creature, young bird' is an instance of semantic broadening, and the change of BEAD to mean 'small round object' instead of the original 'prayer' (through a reanalysis of the phrase 'counting (one's) beads', when wooden balls on a string were used to keep track of one's prayers) is an instance of semantic shift or transfer. All three of these developments fit within the general category of semantic change. (Some would call all of these changes "shifts", but I find the distinction useful to retain.) In any case, I would expect that the sort of change you're looking at in the history of "get out of here" would indeed count as an instance of semantic shift, like that in the history of BEAD. Larry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 18:07:48 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:07:48 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. Not anymore. One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 19:23:21 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 20:23:21 +0100 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. > > Not anymore. > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > Peter Mc. I don't see why this doesn't involve the "literal" meaning. She wants a "go ahead" to not bother stuffing the envelopes. I suppose your point is that she's asking permission to not take a course of action, so she can't go ahead to it. (Is that what you're saying?) She certainly does need a go-ahead to not do it, though, if it was previously considered part of her job to stuff them. The other (non-negative) cases seem to be saying "I assume I have your permission to..." (and sometimes they also seem to mean "I give myself permission to", as in "I'm going to go ahead and buy those endangered species shoes.") The thing about 'go ahead' and permission seems to be that it involves permission for somthing that you were inclined/expected to do anyway, but for which there was some barrier to your just doing it. For example, the sec'y who says "I'll go ahead and get him" is acknowledging that it's what she'd like to do (because it's what you want her to do) but she still has to excuse herself from your presence. So the "I'll go ahead and.." is "assuming I have your permission, I'll..." I think you'd hear this a lot in secretaries because everything they do involves someone else's permission. (And I think you'd hear it a lot from women because they're overrepresented in such positions.) I've checked the web for some other go-ahead-and-not examples. Most were literal "go forward" sorts of things. (E.g., "We'll just go ahead (in the proceedings) and not discuss this matter further.") Here are a couple of examples that seemed to be more like your secretary's example. http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19990724/ile24087.html I would go ahead and not charge toll on cargo vehicles, which are already burdened by various taxes,... http://rainforest.parentsplace.com/dialog/get/f10infertility/42.html Ok, now that the vertice is in, I can go ahead and not give up for a few months. Public Health people said it was ok not to get the shots I would need to do home daycare. I can just get them later... (the vertice?) I'll just go ahead and sign myself Lynne From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 19:39:10 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:39:10 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. DMLance "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. > > Not anymore. > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > Peter Mc. > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From prez234 at JUNO.COM Wed Aug 23 09:26:45 2000 From: prez234 at JUNO.COM (Joseph McCollum) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 04:26:45 CDT Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:10:21 EDT Bapopik at aol.com writes: >It could just as easily be Spam Cam. >--Barry Popik Oh, I like that one much better. This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" I have heard two different versions: (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, but what are s & p ? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 22 20:25:14 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:25:14 EDT Subject: Grand Hotel (Stockholm) cocktails Message-ID: Greetings from Stockholm--where I am NOT staying at the Grand Hotel. L. O. Smith supposedly stayed at the place. He founded Absolut. From the Grand Hotel menu: COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH FRENCH APPLE--Calcados, Dry Sherry, Champagne, Cranberry. OSCAR II--Punsch, Champagne. GIN BY ME--Gin, Absolut Currant, Lime Juice. ABSOLUT AMOUR--Absolut Citron, Parfait Amour, Cranberry, Citron, Sprite. GOTLANDSH SOMMARNATT--Gin, Cointreau, Banana Liqueur, Orange Juice. HASHI DASHI--Vodka, Compari, Bitter Lemon. COFFEE D.O.M.--Benedictine, Coffee, WHipped Cream. ITALIAN--Strega, Coffee, WHipped Cream. IRISH MEXICAN LEONARD SACHS--Grand Marnier, Kahlua, Coffee, Whipped Cream. (Attached is some cocktail stuff that was in my e-mail ...I also have another great ABUZZ question to answer today.) -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: editor at cocktail.com Subject: [cocktail.com] The Cocktail.Communiqu?/August 22, 2000 Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:40:07 -0000 Size: 5571 URL: From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 20:30:24 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:30:24 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it seems strange to others. DMLance "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. > DMLance > > "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > > > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > > > > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, "I'll > > go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's confined > > to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the like. With > > some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes "go-ahead-and V." The > > meaning seems to be something like, "Get ready--pay attention--verb > > coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > > carry out. > > > > Not anymore. > > > > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and not > > even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to complete a > > transition that I had not seen completed before. > > > > Peter Mc. > > > > **************************************************************************** > > Peter A. McGraw > > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Tue Aug 22 20:36:48 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:36:48 +0100 Subject: vanishing languages/salon In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >For those of you who were interested in the review of _Vanishing >Languages_ on salon.com, the letters have now been posted. > David Crystal will be giving a talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on vanishing languages and their preservation this Sunday. Does anybody want me to record it for them? -- ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Departments of English Language and aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang and fa fair \\ // \\// / / From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:03:17 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:03:17 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <39A2E2DA.A4F2EEE6@missouri.edu> Message-ID: --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 3:30 PM -0500 "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating > with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible > move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or > after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it > seems strange to others. > DMLance > In my case, too, the expression fits perfectly in that context, and "I'd say that" in the same situation. The "secretarial" usage I was trying to describe, however, is in situations where there is NO overt context of permission, hesitation-then-resolve, etc. Rather, it's become a meaningless preface to almost every verb. Lynne may be on the right track in suggesting that it arose among secretaries because they're used to needing permission to do everything. If so, though, it's become so ingrained that it's used by some even in contexts where permission--or resolve-after-hesitation or whatever--is not involved, at least overtly. Even though I'd also use "go ahead and" in the same contexts Donald would, I'm sure I'd never "go ahead and" NOT do something in any context except, perhaps, a creatively facetious one. Peter Mc. > "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > >> Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. >> DMLance >> >> "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: >> >> > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. >> > >> > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around >> > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, >> > "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's >> > confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the >> > like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes >> > "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get >> > ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that >> > at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that >> > the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, >> > have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. >> > >> > Not anymore. >> > >> > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and >> > not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to >> > complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. >> > >> > Peter Mc. >> > >> > ********************************************************************** >> > ****** Peter A. McGraw >> > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR >> > pmcgraw at linfield.edu **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:11:14 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:11:14 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > carry out. I've never thought of go-ahead-and-V as being related to being given a go-ahead, as in permission. To me (and I do use the expression) it indicates my decision to do something that I had perhaps been thinking about not doing or something that I was putting off. E.g., I think I'll go ahead and vacuum the dog hairs off of the car seat (I had been thinking about doing it tomorrow but have decided to go ahead and do it now) or I think I'll go ahead and tell him that I don't want to go (I had been thinking about not telling him). I sometimes use go-on-and-V in the same contexts. I'm not sure which I use more often, go-on-and or go-ahead-and. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:27:59 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:27:59 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: The "go ahead" portion might not be acquiescence of a subordinate but an indication that the new request interrupts something else (s)he's been doing during a busy day. It may be directed to herself (her, since the tone of the discussion seems to have been gendered in this direction) rather than to the boss. DMLance "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 3:30 PM -0500 "Donald M. Lance" > wrote: > > > P.S. In my case, the expression fits perfectly when I've been debating > > with myself whether/when to act or a group has been discussing a possible > > move and I/we make a decision to act, whether after a few seconds or > > after a longer time. It's so "I'd say that" that I don't see why it > > seems strange to others. > > DMLance > > > > In my case, too, the expression fits perfectly in that context, and "I'd > say that" in the same situation. > > The "secretarial" usage I was trying to describe, however, is in situations > where there is NO overt context of permission, hesitation-then-resolve, > etc. Rather, it's become a meaningless preface to almost every verb. > > Lynne may be on the right track in suggesting that it arose among > secretaries because they're used to needing permission to do everything. > If so, though, it's become so ingrained that it's used by some even in > contexts where permission--or resolve-after-hesitation or whatever--is not > involved, at least overtly. > > Even though I'd also use "go ahead and" in the same contexts Donald would, > I'm sure I'd never "go ahead and" NOT do something in any context except, > perhaps, a creatively facetious one. > > Peter Mc. > > > "Donald M. Lance" wrote: > > > >> Not just secretaries. I'm sure I've been using it for years. > >> DMLance > >> > >> "Peter A. McGraw" wrote: > >> > >> > Well, maybe not the ultimate, but a first for me. > >> > > >> > I don't remember when I became conscious of this, but it's been around > >> > awhile. It's what might be called the empty "go-ahead-and." As in, > >> > "I'll go ahead and tell Mr. Smith you're here." In my experience it's > >> > confined to female speakers who are secretaries, receptionists and the > >> > like. With some speakers, it seems as if EVERY verb becomes > >> > "go-ahead-and V." The meaning seems to be something like, "Get > >> > ready--pay attention--verb coming." Nonetheless it seems to me that > >> > at least a vestige of literal meaning is usually preserved, in that > >> > the verb that follows denotes an action that one MIGHT, theoretically, > >> > have been waiting for a go-ahead to carry out. > >> > > >> > Not anymore. > >> > > >> > One of the secretaries here just said, "Do you want me to go-ahead-and > >> > not even bother stuffing those envelopes?" Somehow that seems to > >> > complete a transition that I had not seen completed before. > >> > > >> > Peter Mc. > >> > > >> > ********************************************************************** > >> > ****** Peter A. McGraw > >> > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > >> > pmcgraw at linfield.edu > > **************************************************************************** > Peter A. McGraw > Linfield College * McMinnville, OR > pmcgraw at linfield.edu From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Tue Aug 22 21:34:38 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 17:34:38 -0400 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <200008222111.QAA09960@disney.cs.msstate.edu> Message-ID: I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's self-permission. "Go on and (do something)" is less common for me but not unfamiliar. Neither form has ever struck me as "secretarial" in tone or use, and neither form appears to be regionally restricted, from the cites of us three (Texas?, Mississippi, and Minnesota). At 04:11 PM 8/22/00 -0500, you wrote: >Peter McGraw wrote: > > > Nonetheless it seems to me that at least a vestige of literal > > meaning is usually preserved, in that the verb that follows denotes an > > action that one MIGHT, theoretically, have been waiting for a go-ahead to > > carry out. > >I've never thought of go-ahead-and-V as being related to being given >a go-ahead, as in permission. To me (and I do use the expression) >it indicates my decision to do something that I had perhaps been >thinking about not doing or something that I was putting off. E.g., >I think I'll go ahead and vacuum the dog hairs off of the car seat >(I had been thinking about doing it tomorrow but have decided to go >ahead and do it now) or I think I'll go ahead and tell him that I >don't want to go (I had been thinking about not telling him). > >I sometimes use go-on-and-V in the same contexts. I'm not sure which >I use more often, go-on-and or go-ahead-and. > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Tue Aug 22 22:22:48 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 15:22:48 -0700 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000822172747.016bddd0@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Since (with all due respect) nobody so far seems to understand what I'm talking about (not permission, not self-permission, not proceeding-after-a-pause-or-hesitation, not equivalent to "go on and" -- just an empty formula devoid of meaning, more like a nervous tick than anything else), I wonder if the phenomenon I've observed IS in fact regional. I never thought of it as such, but I wouldn't swear I'd heard it elsewhere. I'd ALMOST swear I heard it used by our dept. secretary in Tennessee, but that was a long time ago. Peter Mc. --On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 5:34 PM -0400 Beverly Flanigan wrote: > I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never > thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's > self-permission. "Go on and (do something)" is less common for me but not > unfamiliar. Neither form has ever struck me as "secretarial" in tone or > use, and neither form appears to be regionally restricted, from the cites > of us three (Texas?, Mississippi, and Minnesota). **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From gcohen at UMR.EDU Tue Aug 22 22:53:24 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:53:24 -0600 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Kathleen Miller (Aug. 22, 2000) wrote: > >Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese and we're stuck with >a lingusitic question. What is it called when a phrase, such as "get out >of here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic shift, or is there >another name for it? > ------I would refer interested linguists to my article 'Change of Meaning in Context', _Forum Linguisticum_, vol. 2, no. 3, April 1978, pp.257-266. Based on this article I would say about Noo Yawkese "get out of here": We deal with an expression acquiring a secondary meaning in context. The literal meaning remains: "Get out of here (with your ridiculous ideas)." But a secondary meaning also appears: "That's absolutely ridiculous." One may view the situation as if there is a pregnant woman, with conception having occurred (the foetus is the new meaning of "Get out of here") but with birth not yet having occurred (the new meaning--"That's absolutely ridiculous"-- is not yet independent of the basic meaning--"Leave!" FWI, I have given new terminology to this sort of development: 1) "genosemy" (stress on -o-) literally: conception of meaning -- the acquring by a word (or morpheme or group of words) of a secondary meaning in a given context. 2) "toxemy", literally: birth of meaning. -- the development of a secondary meaning into a primary one. (e.g. "as well"--primary meaning: "as capably", e.g. "He plays the violin like a master and can play the piano as well;" secondary meaning in context here: "also." Then, e.g.: "He flunked physics and failed chemistry as well." All connections with "as capably" are lost for "as well" in this last example. 3) "physemy" literally: the growth of meaning -- genosemy and toxemy combined. This pertains to the "as well" example just above. In the above example "Get out of here," we see genosemy but not toxemy. The woman, so to speak, is still pregnant. -----Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Tue Aug 22 23:22:30 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 18:22:30 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: Peter McGraw wrote: > not equivalent to "go on and" -- How does it differ from "go on and"? Could you give some more examples? --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU Wed Aug 23 01:23:57 2000 From: LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU (Donald M. Lance) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 20:23:57 -0500 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: I think Peter has given enough examples. It seems to me he's claiming that some people, perhaps more in some region(s), use the the expression with NO hint of implicit or explicit will and no triggering context. Peter, do you mean something like someone saying "OK, I read in the paper this morning that xyz" when there's absolutely no way anyone could conjure up elements in the situation that would call for assent, dissent, or other "sentness" etc.? OK, maybe so. DMLance Natalie Maynor wrote: > Peter McGraw wrote: > > > not equivalent to "go on and" -- > > How does it differ from "go on and"? Could you give some more examples? > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From P2052 at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 02:23:39 2000 From: P2052 at AOL.COM (P2052 at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 22:23:39 EDT Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: For me, too, patterns, "go ahead and" and "go on and," have different meanings. For example, I have heard "go ahead and" used both to reaffirm a decision to perform an action and to urge the immediate initiation of that action, which all participants understand to be a necessary one. However, I have heard "go on and" used to urge the continuance of an action that has already begun (either physically [the person has actually made a move toward the completion of that act], psychologically [the person appears to have altered his or her immediate environment in preparation for the act], or verbally [the person has indicated plans to immediately engage in the act]. I can say "Go ahead [with your decision [plan] to perform this action]", but not "Go on [with your decision [plan] to perform this action]." In my mind, "go ahead and" marks the decision as important a part of the process as the performance of the action. With "go on and," the focus is not on the decision; rather, the focus is on the actuall performance of the act itself, whose starting point, or preliminary step, is inconsequential. PAT From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Wed Aug 23 07:21:23 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 02:21:23 -0500 Subject: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?) Message-ID: Joseph McCollum wrote: > This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" > > I have heard two different versions: > > (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story > unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller > of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) > > (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, > but what are s & p ? Yes, there should be something in the ADS Archives -- but I'm too rushed this week to look it up myself. My wild guess is that this application of spam comes out of Monty Python's Flying Circus: the Spam skit. The original airing of that show was early enough that it probably antedates the first appearances of that stuff we call spam on the Internet. There always has been a wide overlap between dedicated Monty Python fans and Internet residents, so my guess is plausible even if it's dead wrong. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! P.S.: I used "residents" deliberately. That was supposed to be the term of choice in formal speech about programs for the inmates/prisoners/convicts/perps/ cons/what-have-you at Stateville, the ancient maximum security prison run by the state of Illinois. Ooops -- I didn't mean "prison", of course. I should have said "correctional facility". I taught in the program Northern Illinois University used to run for Stateville residents. Some of our students were such longterm residents that they completed high school equivalency courses and went on to earn NIU bachelor's degrees on the inside. (In fact, one of my former students inside Stateville entered graduate study at NIU when he got out. He turned out to be one of the most effective teaching assistants in the English department, on his way to the Ph.D.) From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 23 03:32:05 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 23:32:05 -0400 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: "Aaron E. Drews" writes: >>>>> As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is losing its consistency in practice, I think. <<<<< Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political joke. "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it well-formed? In what contexts *does* this treatment apply? -- Mark, (though nothing like the traveler Barry is) from Ieper (Where I heard Last Call at the Menenpoort on Sunday night and said Kaddish for all the dead commemorated there.) From aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 09:23:47 2000 From: aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK (Aaron E. Drews) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:23:47 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: > > "Aaron E. Drews" writes: > > >>>>> > As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the > plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal > system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, > government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is > losing its consistency in practice, I think. > <<<<< > > Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) > > "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political > joke. I think it would be "are", although I can't recall having heard the plural in this way. > > "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? Definitely. I just heard this morning on chldren's television in a pseudo-reinactment of Euro 2000, the presenter said "and Romania are through to the finals". > > "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it > well-formed? Yes, it is well-formed. I'm not sure when a singular would be used, if at all. I'll keep my ear out since Europe, the European Commission, France, Germany, etc. are often in the 'local' news. I'll see if I can find some printed quotes, too, although I never read the sports section. I think "Brussels" takes the singular, although I'm not sure at all. --Aaron ________________________________________________________________________ Aaron E. Drews The University of Edinburgh aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk Departments of English Language and http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron Theoretical & Applied Linguistics Bide lang an fa fair -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: aaron.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 374 bytes Desc: Card for Aaron E. Drews URL: From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Wed Aug 23 14:59:53 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:59:53 -0400 Subject: spam (was: "Internet Home" (Have a "ham-cam"?)) Message-ID: Joseph McCollum writes: >>>>> This has probably come up before, but whence "spam?" I have heard two different versions: (1) The original spam was actually sent out by Spam. (I find this story unlikely: it doesn't seem that a meat-packing company or even a reseller of canned meat would be an early entrant into e-commerce.) (2) Spam stands for "s-something p-something advertising message." OK, but what are s & p ? <<<<< The usual suspect is Monty Python's Flying Circus. A fellow in a restaurant asks what's available. Most or all of the items on the list that the waitress recites include Spam, usually ridiculously (of course), and the conversation keeps getting interrupted by the other patrons (a party of Vikings) singing in chorus: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam. It's repetitive, voluminous, unasked-for, unwanted, and content-free, and it drowns out everything else. Don't ask me where I picked this up; probably prior discussion here, and probably elsewhere as well. -- Mark From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Wed Aug 23 12:02:07 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 14:02:07 +0200 Subject: Pamplemousse Message-ID: Just a quick heads-up to say I'm back on the list. My received mail count dipped under 120 per day and I was feeling a little left out... -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 30 rue de Beaubourg 75003 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 12:50:11 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 13:50:11 +0100 Subject: The ultimate go-ahead-and Message-ID: > From: Beverly Flanigan > I agree with Don and Natalie. I've used the phrase many times and never > thought of it as acknowledging permission, unless it's > self-permission. If linguistic analysis comes down to what we're thinking that we're doing when we say something, then we might as well all go home! I'm sure most people who pepper their sentences with "you know" or "like" don't think they're doing much there either. Perhaps the word "permission" was troublesome to some of you, but I do think "go ahead and" a face-management tactic (in the politeness theory sense of "face"). But I think analyzing it is also a bit tricky because I think there's more than one use for "go ahead and". For the most part, it seems to involve stating the intention to do something that's already been introduced into the realm of possibilities. This would be a fun thing to do a corpus study of. I'm also wondering if there's a particular prosodic signature for the ones that Peter thinks are particularly empty. The problem with this list is that I keep adding more things to my "to be researched" list instead of finishing my "to be researching" list. Lynne From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 23 13:07:15 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 14:07:15 +0100 Subject: The United States is/are Message-ID: > "Aaron E. Drews" writes: > > >>>>> > As for Britain (well, mostly England) referring to the U.S. in the > plural, it has nothing to do with being a Federal vs. a Confederal > system. Countries and large collective nouns (teams, committees, > government agencies, etc) are treated as plural, although this is > losing its consistency in practice, I think. > <<<<< > > Are France plural? (What's a Frant, anyway?) > > "France are part of Europe"? Hardly, I expect, and that's not a political > joke. > > "France have won the World Cup"? Maybe. Or does that refer to the team? > > "France have pulled out of the negotiations"? That's political; is it > well-formed? > > In what contexts *does* this treatment apply? If France is standing for a group of people, then it's likely to be treated as a plural in BrE--just as any singular collective noun referring to people is likely to be treated as a plural (e.g., "the jury have retired to the conference room"). So, you could have France are when it refers to a team, as you've given above. France are suffering from the injury of their top player. However, you're much more likely to hear "The French are..." in a lot of these contexts, so it's not easy to find examples. (Tried to check on Altavista.uk, but ran into too many e.g.s like "the majority of ATMs in France are made in Scotland"--fun fact of the day). BTW, Fowler's (3rd ed.) says that United States and the Vatican are _always_ treated as singulars. Lynne From bookrat at BOOKRAT.COM Wed Aug 23 14:51:20 2000 From: bookrat at BOOKRAT.COM (Bookrat) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 07:51:20 -0700 Subject: Dot-com lot Message-ID: >From an article in today's Salon ("Dot-com culture clash"): '"You're starting to hear, 'Oh, that's a dot-com lot' where you see an expensive house torn down to make room for a bigger one," says a local politician.' (http://www.salon.com/business/feature/2000/08/23/sbarbara/index1.html) Living as I do in Silicon Valley, I am surprised not to have heard that term here. Ken Miller Assistant Drone Johnson Institute for the Study of Harmless Drudgery From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 16:25:03 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 12:25:03 EDT Subject: More from Stockholm Message-ID: Greetings again from Stockholm. Unfortunately, the Grant Barrett ancestral home is not on my tour. I've got to go to dinner and don't have time for my Swedish food roundup. -------------------------------------------------------- BIG APPLE ON ABUZZ (continued, of course) I wait awhile for people to post. Of the last few postings on the Big Apple, the Salwen "whore theory" was mentioned. You put any crap up on the internet, and people quote it. Gerald Cohen writes an entire book--NEVER QUOTED! The NY Times should have addressed this five years ago and Salwen should have been shamed enough to remove it. Again, the Big Apple is not mentioned in CITY OF EROS (a history of NYC prostitution), the POLICE GAZETTE's slang lists (it's not ANYWHERE in the Police Gazette), Stephen Crane's MAGGIE--GIRL OF THE STREETS... Someone on Abuzz mentioned the Big A--the nickname of Aqueduct racetrack. This was coined by NY Daily News writer Gene Ward in the 1950s, after Big Apple=NYC racetracks. Gene Ward is another person who was alive eight years ago, but who's now dead. I'm told that William Safire might actually address the "Big Apple" in September. If so, again, I have tons of important stuff that's never been published and that he's never looked at. I sent it to him eight years ago, and it's pretty embarrassing to send it to him and tell him everything now. -------------------------------------------------------- FINANCIAL TIMES I told the FINANCIAL TIMES that Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady and Eddie Jones will not all play for the Miami Heat--the first two players signed with the Orlando Magic. Miami and Orlando are not the same! The paper will, perhaps, correct its error. I also suggested a "business jargon" column. The FINANCIAL TIMES--which has a sports column, a chess column, a crossword puzzle, a bridge column, a gardening column, et al.--said that a language column just wasn't for them. See attached. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Sheila.Bradbury at ft.com (Sheila Bradbury) Subject: Baseball column Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 14:40:57 +0100 Size: 2353 URL: From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 23 17:36:55 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:36:55 -0700 Subject: Grand Hotel (Stockholm) cocktails Message-ID: --- Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Stockholm--where I am NOT staying > at the Grand Hotel. > L. O. Smith supposedly stayed at the place. He > founded Absolut. > From the Grand Hotel menu: > > COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH > FRENCH APPLE--Calcados, Dry Sherry, Champagne, > Cranberry. Calcados = Calvados - apple brandy? ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 23 20:49:00 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 16:49:00 EDT Subject: Back from Old Stockholm Message-ID: I'm back from dinner in Old Stockholm. I have three minutes before this place closes at 10:30 p.m. "Calvados" was misspelled. This internet place has me typing in the dark and I hit the wrong key on this foreign keyboard. BANKOMAT--The tour guide read that a Swedish person invented the ATM. The ATMs were Minibanks in Norway, but they are Bankomats here. There is an R for registered trademark. FRENCH HOT DOG--These are sold all over. In Norway, I reported on the "French Dog Dressing." BREVANN--a drink selection in Trondheim. Vodka, banana liqueur, curacoa, sour mix, grape soda (shaken). GUL GENSER--Another Trondheim drink. Vodka, banana liqueur, orange juice. TRUSEFJERNER--Another Trondheim drink. Vodka, banana liqueur, lime, Sprite. KAFFE MELANGE--Found in Trondheim, Norway. "Enkel espresso, O'boy (chocolate syrup--ed), mjelk." IRISH COFFEE, KAFFE BENEDICTINE, KAFFE PARISIENNE, KAFFE MANDARINE-Coffee selections at the Amiralen in Stockholm, located near the national museums. KIRSBERRY KISS--A drink at the Amiralen. Contains Kirsberry, tonic, citron. DRINK AND DRIVE, DRINK AND GO--Non-alcoholic selections at the Amiralen. Contents weren't indicated. DRINK A L'AMIRALEN--Champagne, cognac, apricot. TOAST SKAGEN, SOLE WALEWSKI, FILET OF VEAL OSCAR, CLOUDBERRY PARFAIT--Some food selections at the Amiralen. -------------------------------------------------------- SWEDISH COOKING ICA Bokforlag (www.forlaget.ica.se/bok) First edition published 1971, 14th edition 1995, fourth printing 2000 112 pages A nice "Swedish Culinary Glossary from A to O" is on pages 105-108. Pg. 42: Sailor's Beef. Pg. 52: Sun's Eye. Pg. 60: Jansson's Temptation. Pg. 86: Rice a la Malta. Pg. 88: Hono Bread. Pg. 90: Brogards Bread. Pg. 90: Skane Loaf. Pg. 96: Danish Pastry. (Swedish name given is "Wienerbroad" or Vienna bread-ed.) Pg. 100--Princess Torte. Pg. 104--Roslagen's Coffee. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 09:32:21 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:32:21 EDT Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: From today's FINANCIAL TIMES, 24 August 2000, pg. 8, col. 6: The new economy has another piece of jargon. "Neutramediaries" are independent third parties that provide services to business-to-business electronic marketplaces. The FT "E-Business" column, pg. 12, col. 1, has "Intel backs 'bypass' technology." What is that? Well, look in the FT or WSJ business dictionary! (There is none.) In today's Letters, pg. 10, col. 5, "Webster's dictionary" is cited. Which Webster's? The e-mail address is letter.editor at ft.com. Page 9 has such classic business columns as "Cinema," "Music," and "Arts." A few years ago, I mentioned the book HOW WRITING BEGAN. It began with written numbers. Then there were written letters. It all began with trade--business. Business helped to create language itself! It's pathetic that there can be such columns in computer magazines (WIRED) and music magazines (REVOLUTION), but the FT and the WSJ still act as if all these e- and i- terms need no explanation whatsoever. My idea was a daily column written by several regulars, such as me, Jesse, Lynne, Dennis, whomever. Maybe someone else can approach the FT? Maybe someone from "Webster's"? From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 09:37:11 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:37:11 EDT Subject: Frapino Message-ID: "Frapino" is the registered trademark of the Coffee Cup. Starbucks, of course, has "Frapuccino." These are probably somewhere on the web. Robert's Coffee has: COCCACINO--espresso med chokladkram och varm mjolk. ORIENTALISK LATTE--dubbel espresso, varm mjolk, kanel och kardemumma. HUNTER--dubbel espresso med varm mjolk romsandk toppad med choklad. HASSELDROM--dubbel espresso varm mjolk hasselnot och kamelsmak toppad med gradde. ABSOLUT--There's an interesting story on Sweden's ABSOLUT in today's FINANCIAL TIMES, pg. 34. From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 09:50:02 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 05:50:02 -0400 Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: I really like Barry's idea of a business terms column, featuring lots of new e- and i- lingo. I am going to contact the WSJ about this, and will let everyone know what they say. Who at ADS would control the use of the name of the Society as a sanctioner of the column? Would it be possible for ADS to make a buck on this, with part of each column fee going to the author of that column? Under that scenario, I think re-use rights would be the property of ADS. Allan? Frank Abate From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 12:18:54 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:18:54 +0100 Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: > It's pathetic that there can be such columns in computer magazines (WIRED) and music > magazines (REVOLUTION), but the FT and the WSJ still act as if all these e- and i- terms > need no explanation whatsoever. > My idea was a daily column written by several regulars, such as me, Jesse, Lynne, > Dennis, whomever. > Maybe someone else can approach the FT? Maybe someone from "Webster's"? > I think if you want to get a British business publication to cover language regularly, you have a much better bet with the Economist, which tends to see the connections between life and money better than financial newspapers do. One reason FT probably doesn't care about language is that it's _Guardian_ and _Independent_ turf. It really is a joy to see how much writing is done about language in the newspapers here (if you read the right papers). Reflections on words, dictionaries, etymologies. If the FT did do a column, I doubt they'd want so many Yanks writing on it! All they know about language is killing it! (This is not a point to be debated, just the expression of a stereotype.) Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From gcohen at UMR.EDU Thu Aug 24 14:15:53 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 08:15:53 -0600 Subject: B. Popik's new material on "The Big Apple" Message-ID: In an Aug. 23 message Barry Popik wrote in part: > I'm told that William Safire might actually address the "Big Apple" in >September. If so, again, I have tons of important stuff that's never been >published.... > -----------If Barry would send me that material, I'll publish it, first in _Comments on Etymology_ (a series of working papers) and then formally in my monograph series _Studies in Slang_. ---Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 14:03:44 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:03:44 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language Message-ID: Lynne M said from the UK: >> It really is a joy to see how much writing is done about language in the newspapers here (if you read the right papers). Reflections on words, dictionaries, etymologies. << This picks up on a tendency that's well known to US publishers. It is VERY hard to get any US paper, or even the widely read reviewing publications, to agree to publish a review for a reference book, esp. a general dictionary. Even the NYT Book Review will not, except perhaps for a major new edition of one of the established dicts. In the UK, the TLS regularly reviews ref books and general dicts, as do the similar reviewing pubs from other papers. I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. It is a disservice to the US book-buying community. You have to really look hard to find accurate and reliable info on which dictionary to choose, and how they differ. Ken Kister did a great job with this for many years, but his work is not widely known outside the library and ref editorial world (a pretty small world, to be sure). Frank Abate From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 14:08:31 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:08:31 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language In-Reply-To: <000a01c00dd4$1dc5bd20$e301a8c0@fabate> from "Frank Abate" at Aug 24, 2000 10:03:44 AM Message-ID: > > I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, > the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref > books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be > done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by > librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. Actually, Publishers Weekly just ran a review of the AHD4. It looks like it's a rephrasing of the press release, but that is also par for the course for U.S. dictionary reviews. Still, it's there. Jesse Sheidlower OED From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 24 14:36:32 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:36:32 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language Message-ID: Jesse S said: >> Actually, Publishers Weekly just ran a review of the AHD4. It looks like it's a rephrasing of the press release, but that is also par for the course for U.S. dictionary reviews. Still, it's there. << Thanks for the word, Jesse. That's a very good thing, and a new attitude on the part of PW. But I'll bet AHD had to fight hard to get them to do it. Frank Abate From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 15:14:21 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:14:21 +0100 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: For reasons too boring to go into (re a manuscript on antonymy), I need to find a dictionary that lists the word 'unedible' (could be in the entry for 'edible', could be in the long list of un- words some dictionaries have, could be its own entry). I have reason to believe that there is a US dictionary that includes it, since the National Scrabble Association's _Official Tournament and Club Word List_ (published by Merriam-Webster) includes it. According to an article about the word list that I read in _Scrabble News_ (ok, it's official, I'm the biggest nerd on the planet), the words in it are derived from a number of US dictionaries (but the preface to OTCWL just mentions M-W's 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you check for me? Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay Championships this weekend. Your nerd, Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From stevek at SHORE.NET Thu Aug 24 15:19:50 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:19:50 -0400 Subject: unedible request In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th > Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or > Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you > check for me? It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) > Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay > Championships this weekend. Good luck! New to AHD4 are 'jo' and 'suq'. The Scrabble players on the staff were quick to notice they weren't in A3. :) From epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM Thu Aug 24 15:14:33 2000 From: epearsons at RANDOMHOUSE.COM (Pearsons, Enid) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:14:33 -0400 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: _Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary_ has "unedible" as an adj. in among the un- words listed at the bottom of p. 2064, second column. Enid Pearsons Senior Editor Random House Reference -----Original Message----- From: Lynne Murphy [mailto:lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 11:14 AM To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: unedible request For reasons too boring to go into (re a manuscript on antonymy), I need to find a dictionary that lists the word 'unedible' (could be in the entry for 'edible', could be in the long list of un- words some dictionaries have, could be its own entry). I have reason to believe that there is a US dictionary that includes it, since the National Scrabble Association's _Official Tournament and Club Word List_ (published by Merriam-Webster) includes it. According to an article about the word list that I read in _Scrabble News_ (ok, it's official, I'm the biggest nerd on the planet), the words in it are derived from a number of US dictionaries (but the preface to OTCWL just mentions M-W's 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you check for me? Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay Championships this weekend. Your nerd, Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 24 15:25:46 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:25:46 +0100 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: > From: "Steve K." > It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p > 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) Thanks very much Steve! I now withdraw my unedible request. Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 15:22:38 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 11:22:38 -0400 Subject: unedible request In-Reply-To: from "Steve K." at Aug 24, 2000 11:19:50 AM Message-ID: > > On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Lynne Murphy wrote: > > > 10th Collegiate and other M-W publications). I've checked the 10th > > Collegiate and AHD--neither have it. If you have Random House or > > Webster's New World (or anything else) sitting beside you, could you > > check for me? > > It's in the un-list of words in the big unabridged Random House on p > 2064. (1987 ed.) and the most recent RHC college (p 1422) It's also in WNW4, as a list word, and is of course in OED. Good luck! Jesse Sheidlower From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 16:24:41 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:24:41 -0400 Subject: UK papers and language In-Reply-To: <000a01c00dd4$1dc5bd20$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Frank Abate wrote: > This picks up on a tendency that's well known to US publishers. It is VERY > hard to get any US paper, or even the widely read reviewing publications, to > agree to publish a review for a reference book, esp. a general dictionary. > Even the NYT Book Review will not, except perhaps for a major new edition of > one of the established dicts. In the UK, the TLS regularly reviews ref > books and general dicts, as do the similar reviewing pubs from other papers. This observation fits with my own experience. When I published the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, it was reviewed in England by the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, and TLS (even though it was an explicitly Americancentric book!), but it was not generally reviewed by American newspapers. The New York Times wrote two entire feature stories about the book, but it was not deemed worthy of coverage by their book reviewers. > I have never understood this, but it's true. Moreover, Publishers Weekly, > the best known trade publication in the business, completely ignores ref > books, as if they do not exist. They feel that reviews of these are to be > done by their partner mag, Library Journal, which of course is only read by > librarians and the few publishers who cater to them. I think this also was true of my book: reviewed in Library Journal, Choice and Booklist, but not by Publishers Weekly. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From language at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 24 16:37:39 2000 From: language at NYTIMES.COM (William Safire) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:37:39 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: (I have not yet subscribed to the listserver, but will as soon as I have an e-mail address -- please reply to this address in the meantime.) Reporting on the Democratic National Convention, a writer for the LA Times recently wrote: "Identifying the D.C. contingent was easy at Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's party in the Conga Room. If she was wearing a revealing top, a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stillettos, if she had that come-hither look, she was definitely Left Coast." The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the more specific manner in which it is used above? Thanks very much, Elizabeth Phillips Research Assistant to William Safire From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 16:55:37 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:55:37 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> from "William Safire" at Aug 24, 2000 12:37:39 PM Message-ID: > Reporting on the Democratic National Convention, a writer for the LA Times > recently wrote: "Identifying the D.C. contingent was easy at Senate > Minority Leader Tom Daschle's party in the Conga Room. If she was wearing a > revealing top, a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stillettos, if she had > that come-hither look, she was definitely Left Coast." > > The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is > synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the > more specific manner in which it is used above? I'm not sure I understand the more specific manner you have in mind. The quoted sentence seems to suggest that a woman with this provocative outlet and demeanor was clearly a Californian, not a D.C.'er. It's a little oddly phrased, since the writer seems to mean that identifying those _not_ from the D.C. contingent is easy, but it makes sense. Jesse Sheidlower OED From pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:33:12 2000 From: pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU (Peter A. McGraw) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 10:33:12 -0700 Subject: Go ahead and (last time, I promise) Message-ID: With apologies, since we've pretty much run this topic into the ground by now, I can't resist adding a new usage note. Last night I discovered another group that suffers from the vacuous-go-ahead virus: computer tech support people--who in my experience are mostly male. It's never "Now click on 'control panel'"--it's "Now goaheadn click on 'control panel.' OK, now goaheadn double click on 'properties,'" etc. An actual quote from last night: "O.k., try that, and if it doesn't work, call again and they'll goaheadn help you." Now I promise I'll goaheadn shut up. Peter Mc. **************************************************************************** Peter A. McGraw Linfield College * McMinnville, OR pmcgraw at linfield.edu From einstein at FROGNET.NET Thu Aug 24 17:25:18 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:25:18 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: Among conservatives (probably deriving from Rush or some other radio commentator), the term for the eastern megalopolis from Boston > D.C. is called the left coast. Presumably the west, where all the good conservatives live, is right. -- db ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:41:34 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:41:34 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, William Safire wrote: > The RHHDAS cites Lewin and Lewin 1988, which says "left coast" is > synonymous with "West Coast." Have any of you come across the term in the > more specific manner in which it is used above? This doesn't address the specific meaning question, but I can give earlier evidence for "Left Coast" than the 1988 dating in the RHHDAS: 1980 _N.Y. Times_ 6 July (Nexis) If you're standing in Texas looking north, as Texans frequently do, the Left Coast is where Hollywood is. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 17:51:15 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:51:15 -0400 Subject: Left Coast Message-ID: At 01:25 PM 8/24/2000 -0400, bergdahl at ohio.edu wrote: >Among conservatives (probably deriving from Rush or some other radio >commentator), the term for the eastern megalopolis from Boston > D.C. is >called the left coast. Presumably the west, where all the good >conservatives live, is right. > I suspect this is a bit off, but then again we all tend to be most familiar with only the smallish circle of what is closest to us. I'm sure I've heard radio and TV hosts occasionally use "left coast" for some years now, in application to the Pacific coast as a supposed locus of "flaky" New Age stuff, "liberal" politics (Berkeley, Hollywood, Seattle anarchy, etc.). The west coast is on the left side of a map. Yes, the northeast is pretty liberal too. I imagine nonleftists think of themselves as tending to populate what bicoastalists sometimes refer to as "flyover country" -- inner west, south, etc. New Yorkers sometimes tend to think, rather insularly, of NY and LA (OK, maybe Miami too) as the only places in the U.S. that "matter," which generates a certain sense of NY/LA rivalry. Hence, cliches about LA and the "left coast" as flaky and goofy are pretty widespread in NYC. I suspect that's what the author cited in the original posting was getting at: "left coast" = putatively flaky, goofy, out-there, both culturally and politically.... Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 24 18:32:22 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:32:22 -0400 Subject: Left Coast In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000824121838.00938b60@mail.nytimes.com> Message-ID: Here's a still earlier usage of "Left Coast": 1977 _Rolling Stone_ 30 June 106 (heading of record review) Wet Willie Left coast live. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 24 18:55:20 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:55:20 EDT Subject: "Neutramediaries" in FT Message-ID: Interesting question from Frank: << Who at ADS would control the use of the name of the Society as a sanctioner of the column? Would it be possible for ADS to make a buck on this, with part of each column fee going to the author of that column? Under that scenario, I think re-use rights would be the property of ADS. Allan? >> The answer is, the ADS Executive Council is the ultimate authority. This would be enough of a departure from current practice that it would require Council approval. Might be a good topic for Council discussion at the January meeting - unless a decision is needed sooner. - Allan From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 24 19:16:02 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:16:02 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: I've just looked through a very large number of citations for "left coast" courtesy of a big database. Every one I looked at used the term to refer to California. It is possible that there is a political sense in which "left coast" refers to Washington, D.C. However I find it hard to believe that the use is that widespread--perhaps it is, but the evidence isn't available to me. The possibilities as I see it are that (as I first suggested) the original quotation represents an awkwardly written attestation of the 'West Coast' sense; or that the quotation really does attest _Left Coast_ 'East Coast'. Presumably the matter could be cleared up with a phone call from Mr. Safire to the writer of the article in question. Jesse Sheidlower OED From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 19:28:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:28:09 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: At 03:16 PM 8/24/2000 -0400, you wrote: >The possibilities as I see it are that (as I first suggested) >the original quotation represents an awkwardly written attestation >of the 'West Coast' sense; or that the quotation really does >attest _Left Coast_ 'East Coast'. Presumably the matter could >be cleared up with a phone call from Mr. Safire to the writer >of the article in question. > >Jesse Sheidlower >OED > What I left implicit in my other posting on this thread, and may as well "go ahead and" make explicit here, is that there seem to be two possibilities in the cited passage: (1) The description of the over-the-top attire is being used to suggest that the DC person is (deliberately?) dressed in over-the-top Hollywood fashion. The convention was held in LA, after all, and one of the commonplaces of political disourse for the last few years has been the affinities that seem to exist between Hollywoodites and members of the Clinton administration. Perhaps the writer is implying that DC Dems (presumably members of the administration and/or DC political operatives) deliberately adopted Left Coast fashion modes at some LA festivities. (2) Less likely, but I suppose it's *possible* that the LA Times columnist doesn't understand the usage of a locution hatched in right-of-center discourse. How much currency does the term "Left Coast" have on the, er, left coast? (3) Or, he's a journalist who doesn't always write -- it's been known to happen.... Deadlines and all that.... Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 24 19:45:22 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:45:22 -0400 Subject: More "left coast" thoughts Message-ID: Sorry, I got interrupted at the end of the last message. The *third* possibility was: (3) Or, he's a journalist who doesn't always write that carefully. -- It's been known to happen.... Deadlines and all that.... [Or interruptions, he added sheepishly.] Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From fitzke at VOYAGER.NET Thu Aug 24 21:02:07 2000 From: fitzke at VOYAGER.NET (Bob Fitzke) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 17:02:07 -0400 Subject: unedible request Message-ID: You go, girl!! Bob in Michigan > Wish me luck--I'm playing in the British Scrabble Matchplay > Championships this weekend. > > Your nerd, > Lynne > > Dr M Lynne Murphy > From t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA Fri Aug 25 04:05:52 2000 From: t.paikeday at SYMPATICO.CA (Thomas Paikeday) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 00:05:52 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. I withdraw my question, apologize to Fred, and wish the book all success. (TMP). Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS > > Yale University Press, > > forthcoming > > > > **** ANY PRICE ON THIS? **** (tmp) From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 25 11:51:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 07:51:50 EDT Subject: Gotland greetings Message-ID: Greetings from Visby, on the island of Gotland. It's called "the town of roses and ruins." I love this town. The stone Viking (or, "Wiking" as some have said) markers with runic inscriptions are just what I love. Just add a "no one has been able to decipher this" and I'm hooked. OK Q8--Popular 7-11-type stores (found on highways) in Sweden use this name. F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." -------------------------------------------------------- SWEDEN: THE SECRET FILES WHAT THEY'D RATHER KEEP TO THEMSELVES by Colin Moon Today Press AB 26 pages, 1999(?) "Swedish English (Swenglish)" is on page 24. An example is: "Please take off your clothes and follow me to the whip room." (Translation: "May I take your coat and accompany you to the VIP room.") Pg. 4--Stockholm is inhabited by "zero eights," so called because of their telephone area codes. Pg. 7--It also makes and exports Absolut vodka, which is rather ironic as the Swedish word for teetotaller is "absolutist." Pg. 15--..."langom," meaning "just enough"... Pg. 21--Swedish small talk. Swedes call this "cold talk" or "dead chat" which more or less sums up their opinion of it. -------------------------------------------------------- XENOPHOBE'S GUIDE TO THE SWEDES by Peter Berlin Oval Books, London 64 pages First edition 1994, second edition 1999 Pg. 21--As the Swedish saying goes: "Like master. like dog." Pg. 30--The cakes are covered with green marzipan, or sliced almonds ("toe-nails"), while the pastries have gobs of vanilla and strwaberry jam in the middle ("grandmother's cough"). Pg. 58--The Swedish Model has become the Swedish Muddle. From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 13:06:04 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 09:06:04 -0400 Subject: Gotland greetings: F-word Message-ID: Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > > ... > > F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." > I think "en film av Lukas Moodysson som gjorde Fucking ?m?l" means "a film by Lukas Moodysson, who did 'Fucking ?m?l'". The famous film "Fucking ?m?l" was released in the US under another name ("Show Me Love", I think). I think the English loan word may be used figuratively/intensively here; ?m?l is the name of a town. See (for example): http://www.stud.ee.ethz.ch/~emschmid/fa/lukasinterview.html ... and check the last sentence in the interview! -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Fri Aug 25 15:13:49 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 11:13:49 EDT Subject: Mike Ellis's SLANGUAGE Message-ID: SLANGUAGE The international USA TODAY, 24 August 2000, pg. 11B, col. 6, gave a free ad for Mike Ellis's new book, SLANGUAGE: A COOL, FRESH, PHAT AND SHAGADELIC GUIDE TO ALL KINDS OF SLANG (Hyperion, $14). It's compiled from his www.slanguage.com stuff that you can get for free (I imagine--I haven't seen the book out yet). It's stuff like Mad Monk Jim Crotty--lots of words and phrases, but no sources whatsoever. You have no idea how many people use the stuff, how old the stuff is, etc. It's probably useful as a fun reference, but just a starter for serious research. -------------------------------------------------------- YUPPIE TEDDY BEAR XENOPHOBE'S GUIDE TO THE SWEDES, pg. 13: The ultimate status symbol is to reserve yet another line for the mobile telephone or "yuppie teddy bear," so nicknamed because of the way the owner clutches it close to his cheek. -------------------------------------------------------- TELEPHONE BOOK From SOS GUIDE: SWEDISH OBSTACLES SIMPLIFIED (1999 by Kursverksamhetens forlag) by Christine Hungar-MacLeod and Angie Sundqvist, pg. 19: WHITE PAGES--private numbers PINK PAGES--businesses, organizations, governmental departments GREEN PAGES--communal organizations BLUE PAGES--medical and dental services RED PAGES--city and street maps Beer is on pg. 11: Class 1 Lattol Weak beer 2.25% volume (max.) Class 2 Folkol "Peoples beer" 3.4% volume (max.) Class 3 Mellanol and starkol Medium and strong beer From 3.5% volume I don't know what OED will have for "mellanol," or "middle-class beer." From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Fri Aug 25 16:04:46 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 09:04:46 -0700 Subject: Gotland greetings Message-ID: --- Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote: > Greetings from Visby, on the island of Gotland. > It's called "the town of roses and ruins." I love > this town. The stone Viking (or, "Wiking" as some > have said) markers with runic inscriptions are just > what I love. Just add a "no one has been able to > decipher this" and I'm hooked. > > OK Q8--Popular 7-11-type stores (found on highways) > in Sweden use this name. "Q8" refers to Kuwait Petroleum International Limited. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU Fri Aug 25 17:54:53 2000 From: fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU (Fred Shapiro) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 13:54:53 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? In-Reply-To: <39A5F0A0.D680136F@sympatico.ca> Message-ID: On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, Thomas Paikeday wrote: > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. I withdraw my question, apologize > to Fred, and wish the book all success. (TMP). No price has yet been set. Thanks for your good wishes. Fred Shapiro ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred R. Shapiro Editor Associate Librarian for Public Services YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press, Yale Law School forthcoming e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Fri Aug 25 18:21:21 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 13:21:21 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or to other words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]. I've regularly heard the conductor Julius Rudel pronounced [ru'dEl], on a variety of programs on NPR. And a number of years ago Ball State had a head football coach named Schudel. His wife is a shirt-tail cousin of my wife, the family's from NW Ohio, near Toledo, and there the name has always been pronounced ['Sud at l]. When he was an assistant coach at Michigan, before he came to Ball State, he found his name so commonly being pronounced [Su'dEl] by people in football, that he adopted the form and made it clear when he came here that that was the pronunciation he preferred. Names that have been around longer seem to have initial stress, like Joel, although Noel goes both ways, more often [no'El] when referring to Christmas, but the composer/lyricist is always ['no at l] Coward. Even Joel, when pronounced as a borrowing from Modern Hebrew, becomes [yo'El], as in the name of the former conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. Other proper nouns have initial stress, like Bethel, Daniel, and Hazel, although I have heard the occasional [daen'yEl] for the spelling Daniel. A number of verbs have final stress, but they're Romance borrowings so that's not surprising: compel, expel, repel. Nouns and adjectives tend to have initial stress: bagel, chancel, chisel, counsel, cruel, diesel, dowel, fuel, hazel, jewel, towel, vowel, but there are exceptions to both patterns, like cancel (never [kaen'sEl], hotel, motel, and pastel. Why is a subset of these words, particularly surnames, undergoing this stress shift? Is it a spelling pronunciation, that is, final in names is rare enough that it seems odd and so it gets stressed, counter to more usual English stress patterns? Why the football connection? Two or three years ago, there was an African-American college player on a southern school team with a four-syllable Scots or Irish name (I don't remember the full name or whether it was Mac or Mc) that ended in . Network TV announcers regularly pronounced his name with final stress, a good trick for an American English four-syllable noun. Is there a southern pattern coming into this through football? Herb Stahlke Ball State University From einstein at FROGNET.NET Fri Aug 25 18:42:58 2000 From: einstein at FROGNET.NET (David Bergdahl) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 14:42:58 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: This is just a guess, but could the final [El] come from avoidance of syllabic-L rather than [@l] or [?l] ? The "swallowing" of the vowel could be heard by non-southerners as uneducated and as such to be avoided. Even [Il] --which I find n atural in some of the words cited-- might be heard as "slurring" and so to be avoided. Again, just a guess. -- db, whose name is pronounced ['b3g d?l] by a colleague originally from NC ___________________________________________________________ David Bergdahl einstein at frognet.net tel: (740) 592-1617 home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl fax: (740) 593-3857 From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Fri Aug 25 19:13:02 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 14:13:02 -0500 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. The anthropologist in me can't resist what Lewis Carroll would have called a contrariwise: My wife and I have spent enough time in Mexico that we're no longer put out of joint when we run across deeply-rooted cultural contrasts. We usually just shift gears and follow local custom. Interacting with reasonably well-to-do people in such places as Mexico City, we still get shocked by very open exchanges about prices. In those circles, the taboo seems to be NOT asking the price of something (whether offered for sale or not). Not asking "how much did that cost?" comes close to implying "You are insignificant, and nobody cares about the things you possess or what they mean to you." It took a very long time for us to accept questions expressed in terms we simply can't imagine happening in similar circles in the U.S. A typical example of a statement that would be taken as appropriately gracious would be something like: "Thank you very much for this beautiful gift. It's exactly what I wanted. How much did it cost you?" -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 20:16:11 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:16:11 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: Herb Stahlke wrote: > > A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words > ending orthographically in . > In medicine, there is a position (supine, head down) called the Trendelenberg position, named after a certain Dr. Trendelenberg (this is in any medical dictionary). In my experience this is virtually always pronounced like /trEn'dEl at nbRg/. According to anecdote, Dr. T. pronounced his name /'trEnd at l@nbRg/. The way the story goes, Dr. T. attended a seminar. The speaker said "... TrenDELenberg position ..." and there was a shout from the audience: "It's TRENdelenberg!" A little later the position was mentioned again, and again the shout was heard: "It's TRENdelenberg!" The speaker then asked: "Who is that yelling back there anyway?" Answer: "It's TRENdelenberg!" I don't know whether the story's exactly true, but certainly the incorrect stress on /El/ occurs a lot, and not only at the end of the name. I think it is the unfamiliar names which have this incorrect stress. I probably do it myself quite often. I don't think you'll hear EnGELS, but Wiesel is less well known. If a name doesn't seem English, one might try to pronounce it phonetically as if it were from a familiar language -- Spanish, German, French -- and it is at least the popular impression that these languages have much less centralization or schwa-formation in unstressed vowels than does English. Then once the full vowel is chosen, the stress will tend to follow it: so once I've decided that Wiesel is /vizEl/ (seems German, and the popular conception is that German is relatively schwa-free), the stress (AT LEAST secondary stress) will tend to go to the second syllable to keep it from being /viz at l/. I would pronounce Daniel /'d&nj at l/ but I wouldn't know how to pronounce, say, Danyell -- I'd probably guess /d&n'jEl/. Also: perhaps there's influence from French, which at least seems to have last-syllable stress (and which has lots of '-el', '-elle' words) and Spanish. Consider 'cartel', on the TV news all the time. [Here I use & = IPA ash and I don't distinguish @ from unstressed I usually.] There are parallels. In Detroit I knew a street named Devonshire, usually pronounced /'dEv at nSajR/. (There are also Goethe [usually /'gowTi/ with T = theta IIRC] and Freud [/frud/] streets in Detroit.) But in Chicago there is a major street named Devon, virtually always pronounced /d@'vAn/ [A as in Chicago 'pop' /pAp/, 'pa' /pA/]: apparently the general impression is that this street was named after a Frenchman named de Von. -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From douglas at NB.NET Fri Aug 25 20:17:33 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:17:33 -0400 Subject: ANY PRICE ON THIS (BOOK)? Message-ID: Mike Salovesh wrote: > > Thomas Paikeday wrote: > > > > In many cultures, asking the price of something not offered for sale is > > taboo. It's a foreboding of bad luck. > > The anthropologist in me can't resist what Lewis Carroll would have > called a contrariwise: > > ... > > It took a very long time for us to accept questions expressed in terms > we simply can't imagine happening in similar circles in the U.S. A > typical example of a statement that would be taken as appropriately > gracious would be something like: > > "Thank you very much for this beautiful gift. It's exactly what I > wanted. How much did it cost you?" > I've had similar experiences. Certain Asian friends would tut-tut about overfamiliarity if I asked someone on brief acquaintance "Are you married?" but persons from the same group had no trouble asking on similar brief acquaintance "How much did you make last year?" .... -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Fri Aug 25 20:12:03 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 16:12:03 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Herb, I have heard this shift to final syllable in lots of words, not just final -el (most suprisingly, for me, in Hungarian names, by the pretend-cultured announcers on most classical stations, where one regularly hears, e.g., ko-DIE, rather than KO-die - for Kodaly). I propose calling this the psuedo-cultured incorrect stress shift (PISS), and I see no reason to doubt that it is modeled on French for the obvious cultural stereotypes. It's interesting to note that in authentic French loans it's US English (not BritEng) whiich presrves the final syllable stress, e.g., bal-LAY and buh-RAY.) dInIs >A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words >ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or to other >words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal >with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]. > I've regularly heard the conductor Julius Rudel pronounced >[ru'dEl], on a variety of programs on NPR. And a number of years >ago Ball State had a head football coach named Schudel. His wife >is a shirt-tail cousin of my wife, the family's from NW Ohio, near >Toledo, and there the name has always been pronounced ['Sud at l]. >When he was an assistant coach at Michigan, before he came to Ball >State, he found his name so commonly being pronounced [Su'dEl] by >people in football, that he adopted the form and made it clear >when he came here that that was the pronunciation he preferred. >Names that have been around longer seem to have initial stress, >like Joel, although Noel goes both ways, more often [no'El] when >referring to Christmas, but the composer/lyricist is always >['no at l] Coward. Even Joel, when pronounced as a borrowing from >Modern Hebrew, becomes [yo'El], as in the name of the former >conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. > >Other proper nouns have initial stress, like Bethel, Daniel, and >Hazel, although I have heard the occasional [daen'yEl] for the >spelling Daniel. A number of verbs have final stress, but they're >Romance borrowings so that's not surprising: compel, expel, >repel. Nouns and adjectives tend to have initial stress: bagel, >chancel, chisel, counsel, cruel, diesel, dowel, fuel, hazel, >jewel, towel, vowel, but there are exceptions to both patterns, >like cancel (never [kaen'sEl], hotel, motel, and pastel. > >Why is a subset of these words, particularly surnames, undergoing >this stress shift? Is it a spelling pronunciation, that is, final > in names is rare enough that it seems odd and so it gets >stressed, counter to more usual English stress patterns? Why the >football connection? Two or three years ago, there was an >African-American college player on a southern school team with a >four-syllable Scots or Irish name (I don't remember the full name >or whether it was Mac or Mc) that ended in . Network TV >announcers regularly pronounced his name with final stress, a good >trick for an American English four-syllable noun. Is there a >southern pattern coming into this through football? > >Herb Stahlke >Ball State University Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Sat Aug 26 06:30:47 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 01:30:47 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (longposting) Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > There are parallels. In Detroit I knew a street named Devonshire, > usually pronounced /'dEv at nSajR/. (There are also Goethe [usually > /'gowTi/ with T = theta IIRC] and Freud [/frud/] streets in Detroit.) > But in Chicago there is a major street named Devon, virtually always > pronounced /d@'vAn/ [A as in Chicago 'pop' /pAp/, 'pa' /pA/]: > apparently the general impression is that this street was named after > a Frenchman named de Von. The nsme of Chicago's Devon Avenue is a good illustration of more or less recent vowel shifting. Fifty years ago, the most common pronunciation had a lower back vowel in that stressed second syllable: d@'vawn, using aw in place of turned c. I hear the low central A of "pop" or "pa" that Douglas Wilson notes much more from younger speakers than from those whose Chicagoese goes back to the 1940s or earlier. (Back in the 1930s, my home was at 6332 North Richmond; Devon is 6400 north on Chicago's grid plan. I always use the lower back vowel.) You've got Goethe right. Chicago's Goethe Street has an unvoiced theta, but otherwise sounds like "go thee"; the stress is on the first syllable. Pronounce Goethe as in German and you wouldn't be likely to find Goethe Street by asking Chicagoans. Back to Detroit: What was that I heard about Jos? Campau Street? (Excuse the spelling -- I've heard the name, but I haven't seen the street signs.) -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Sat Aug 26 07:07:06 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 09:07:06 +0200 Subject: Gotland greetings: F-word Message-ID: On vendredi 25 ao?t 2000, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >F-WORD--Advertised in the subway in Stockholm was "en film av >Lukas Moodysson." The film? "Som Gjorde Fucking Amal." > > I think "en film av Lukas Moodysson som gjorde Fucking ?m?l" >means "a film by Lukas Moodysson, who did 'Fucking ?m?l'". The >famous film "Fucking ?m?l" was released in the US under >another name ("Show Me Love", I think). I think the English >loan word may be used figuratively/intensively here; ?m?l is >the name of a town. See (for example): It may have been released under another name in the States, but I believe in New York it was well-known as "Fucking Amal" (as it is here in Paris). There was some derision towards the New York Times by papers like the Voice for not using the word "fucking" when mentioning, as all the reviewers seemed compelled to do no matter what the paper, that the title had been changed from something more risque (although now I can't find it in the Voice archives). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9941/winter.shtml "Fourteen - year - old Elin (Alexandra Dahlstr?m) harbors a grudge for her Swedish hometown summed up in the film's glorious original title, Fucking Amal ? the mercurial mini - Bardot unleashes a barbaric yawp whenever small-town tedium gets the best of her." http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9934/filmpreviews.shtml "Show Me Love Retitled from the infinitely catchier Fucking Amal, this rude, sweet, funny Swedish import, without trying too hard, shames the recent crop of gay coming-of-age flicks. (DL) October 22" -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 4 rue de Chevreuse 75006 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From douglas at NB.NET Sat Aug 26 09:11:59 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 05:11:59 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final ... Streets Message-ID: Mike Salovesh wrote: > > ... Chicago's Devon Avenue is a good illustration of more or > less recent vowel shifting. Fifty years ago, the most common > pronunciation had a lower back vowel in that stressed second syllable: > d@'vawn, using aw in place of turned c. I hear the low central A of > "pop" or "pa" that Douglas Wilson notes much more from younger speakers > than from those whose Chicagoese goes back to the 1940s or earlier. > (Back in the 1930s, my home was at 6332 North Richmond; Devon is 6400 > north on Chicago's grid plan. I always use the lower back vowel.) > > You've got Goethe right. Chicago's Goethe Street has an unvoiced theta, > but otherwise sounds like "go thee"; the stress is on the first > syllable. Pronounce Goethe as in German and you wouldn't be likely to > find Goethe Street by asking Chicagoans. > > Back to Detroit: What was that I heard about Jos? Campau Street? > (Excuse the spelling -- I've heard the name, but I haven't seen the > street signs.) > I remember Chicago and Detroit well from the 1970's. Now that I think of it, I did hear /d@'vOn/ a lot in Chicago [O like IPA reverse-c] ... but I wouldn't have made much distinction, since many Chicago speakers might tend toward /pOp/ 'pop' too, for example ... I think something close to /pOp/ might predominate as close as Peoria or Champaign. The distinction in this respect between Chicago (= Detroit, etc.) and Pittsburgh (e.g.) is that in Chicago 'Don' and 'Dawn' sound different (/dAn/, /dOn/) while in Pittsburgh they sound the same (/dOn/, /dOn/), regardless of the exact sounds employed. Do/did Chicagoans pronounce 'Devon' to rhyme with 'Don' or with 'Dawn'? I think this was variable in my experience. The German looking for Goethe St. wouldn't have any luck in Detroit either. The street in Detroit named after Joseph Campau [a 3rd-generation American of French ancestry, I think] showed something like "Jos. Campau" on its street signs IIRC. Detroiters said "Campau" or "Joseph Campau" or "Joe Campau" (/'k&mpO/ or /'k&mpow/ [& = IPA ash ('ae')] [I use /ow/ = /ou/ or 'long-O']). Only recently and rarely have I encountered the bizarre "Jos? Campau" -- but then I haven't been in Detroit recently. This is the 'main street' of the city ('suburb') of Hamtramck (named after a [German-]French-Canadian immigrant), traditionally 'Polish' (I think once > 80%) -- now a mixed place whose 2nd language may be Arabic rather than Polish. -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 11:06:00 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 07:06:00 EDT Subject: Karlskrona kibbles Message-ID: Greetings from a brief lunch stop in Karlskrona, Sweden. Attached is an e-mail from the FT. They acknowledged their error. I didn't even have to wait eight years for that! WEST COAST SALAD WITH RHODE ISLAND SAUCE--Spotted at several resaurants in Sweden. Rhode Island sauce isn't especially popular in the States! WALENBERGERS VEAL--one offering. PORK FILLET "ANNA LINDBERG"--Spotted once in Gotland, but no one's familiar with it. CAESAR CHICKEN SANDWICH--Offered by the hamburger restaurant Max. Why Caesar--it's not a salad, it's a hamburger! CHICKY BITS--A popular term for chicken nuggets. OPERA PIZZA--Several places in Gotland had this. Tomato, cheese, ham, and tuna fish. -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Peter.Whitehead at ft.com (Peter Whitehead) Subject: weekend ft basketball error Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 18:25:10 +0100 Size: 2357 URL: From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Sat Aug 26 12:39:01 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 08:39:01 -0400 Subject: Karlskrona kibbles In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is "opera" pizza a joke on "the works"? dInIs > Greetings from a brief lunch stop in Karlskrona, Sweden. >WEST COAST SALAD WITH RHODE ISLAND SAUCE--Spotted at several resaurants in >Sweden. Rhode Island sauce isn't especially popular in the States! > >WALENBERGERS VEAL--one offering. > >PORK FILLET "ANNA LINDBERG"--Spotted once in Gotland, but no one's >familiar with it. > >CAESAR CHICKEN SANDWICH--Offered by the hamburger restaurant Max. Why >Caesar--it's not a salad, it's a hamburger! > >CHICKY BITS--A popular term for chicken nuggets. > >OPERA PIZZA--Several places in Gotland had this. Tomato, cheese, ham, and >tuna fish. Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 19:52:32 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 15:52:32 EDT Subject: Malmo momentos Message-ID: Greetings from Malmo, Sweden. This is the home of Anita Ekberg, but I didn't see her today. Tomorrow I take the bridge (and tunnel) to Copenhagen and then head for home. The Oresund Bridge opened July 1st. I told people here about Steve Brodie and they told me that I can be the very first to jump off this bridge. Thanks! The following is from LOOK AT SWEDEN (SOUTHERN EDITION), no. 3, 2000: Pg. 8, col. 1: Before the sales of the shares, Trade Minister, Bjorn Rosengren asked Ericsson which has 314,000 shareholders the criteria for making a company's shareholding a "folkaktie" ("people's share"). Pg. 24, col. 2: ..."SWD" (She Who Decides)... Pg. 36, col. 1: That every child has a childhood worth being called a childhood is not something we can take for granted, but it is one of the goals of the organization BRIS. (The organization to prevent violence against children is called "BRIS"? As in Jewish circumcision? Was the organizational name "Female Genital Mutilation" taken??--ed) Pg. 81, col. 2: "We want to support locally produced food, and have developed our own label called 'Glassmarkt' (goose marked). Only food products produced and consumed in the Soderslatt region are allowed to wear the mark of the goose." Pg. 83, col. 1: ..."eco-tourist"..."ecotourism"... Pg. 90, col. 1: One of the most commonly known treatments for depression is the so-called "happy pill," or anti-depressive drug. Although the name Prozac quickly comes to mind, the number one anti-depressenat on the market in Sweden and Denmark is in fact Cipramil, produced by Lundbeck in Copenhagen. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Sat Aug 26 22:40:09 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:40:09 EDT Subject: Malmo drinks Message-ID: Greetings again from Malmo, Sweden. This town is buzzing this Saturday night. And you thought the Swedes didn't drink! ESPRESSO HOUSE The menu for the Espresso House is at www.espressohouse.com. I saw "Mullberg 'Black Coffee'" and "Espressino." "Frappuccino" was also offered. See www.starbucks.com. Isn't "Frappuccino" a registered trademark of Starbucks? PM (PUB & MAT) These drinks were at this place in the town I e-mailed from earlier today: MOCCA KINO--espressomed, mjolk, kakao gradde och riven choklad. BREW HA-HA LATTE--espresso med kakao vis-ad gradde rivenho-ad Baileys kal a Grand Marnier. CANDYSHOT--melo nel turkish. MALMO BAR DRINKS These drinks were spotted on one menu (the place was hopping, but I do this just for the research): DING-A-LING--Absolut vodka, passionfruktsmonin och limejuice. SEXBOMB MELLOPOLITAN--Absolut Mandrin, triple seconin, lime och cranberry juice. PARONLUMUMBA SUMMARSHAKE VAT DROM SEX ON THE BEACH--Absolut vodka, peachmonin, apelsin och cranberry juice. RAZOR TONGUE ORGASM--Absolut vodka, Kahlua, Bailey's och mjolk. DALLAS HAMBURGER I've seen a "Dallasburgare" offered several places. It's "hemlagad pannbiff, Dallassallad, turkad lok." From hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU Sat Aug 26 23:29:09 2000 From: hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:29:09 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final (long posting) Message-ID: Another PISS-conforming name: the actor Harvey KeitEL. Herb Stahlke From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 27 01:23:52 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 18:23:52 -0700 Subject: Full acceptance? Message-ID: In Friday's SF Chronicle, there's an ad from Natural Wonders. The larger type reads, "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" Rima From jester at PANIX.COM Sun Aug 27 01:44:01 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 21:44:01 -0400 Subject: Full acceptance? In-Reply-To: from "Kim & Rima McKinzey" at Aug 26, 2000 06:23:52 PM Message-ID: > In Friday's SF Chronicle, there's an ad from Natural Wonders. The > larger type reads, "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" Cite! Cite! Section number, page number, column! JTS From rkm at SLIP.NET Sun Aug 27 06:55:32 2000 From: rkm at SLIP.NET (Kim & Rima McKinzey) Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 23:55:32 -0700 Subject: Full acceptance? In-Reply-To: <200008270144.VAA01280@panix2.panix.com> Message-ID: >... "I wonder if my bedroom could use feng shuing?" > >Cite! Cite! Section number, page number, column! San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, 8/25/00, front section, p. A4, column 1. Rima From t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU Sun Aug 27 08:47:40 2000 From: t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU (Mike Salovesh) Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 03:47:40 -0500 Subject: Streets (was "Stress patterns . . .", etc Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > Do/did Chicagoans pronounce > 'Devon' to rhyme with 'Don' or with 'Dawn'? I think this was variable > in my experience. Thanks, Doug, for retroactively justifying some fieldwork I did today. De Kalb, Illinois, is in the middle of its annual Corn Fest, one feature of which was Saturday morning's 10K run. My running days are long since past, but I still participate as a volunteer: I wear a flourescent vest, wave a baton, and stop traffic from interfering with the runners. This year, the 19th annual Corn Fest Run, the event was sanctioned for the first time as a qualifying round for members of the Chicago Area Running Association. That brought 150 runners more than our usual average of arond 400, and it gave me a perfect opportunity to find a dozen Chicagoans about their pronunciation of "Devon Avenue". (Before or after the 10K run, not while they were on the course.) I did two things to keep the data relatively clean. First, I asked them whether they were native Chicagoans, and where they lived in Chicago. (It was no surprise to me that every Chicagoan I interviewed was from the North Side. If it matters, they were either from the Lincoln Park area or from Wrigleyville. Devon Avenue is pretty close to Chicago's northern city limits.) Second, to avoid contaminating their responses with my pronunciation, my eliciting question was framed as "what street is at 6400 north?" All twelve of my informants stressed the second syllable of "Devon". Ten people aged 35 or younger (in my estimation) pronounced the syllable as a rhyme for "don", "upon", "swan", "John", etc. Two whose ages I would estimate as over 60 both rhymed the last syllable with "dawn", "gone", "brawn", etc. After getting a response, I explained to each informant why I had asked. Eight of the younger Chicagoans expressed surprise, one way or another, to hear that anyone would have a turned c vowel in the second syllable. (One of them actually spelled out his reaction: "That sounds like saying the name Vaughn, "Vee Ay Yoo Jee Aitch Enn".) Both my older informants commented that they hear the don-upon-swan-John version lots more nowadays than they did in their youth. Yesterday, on the sole authority of my own feel for the nature of Chicagoese, I suggested that there has been a recent shift from some back vowel to a low central vowel in this environment. I think my Saturday interviews strongly confirm the impression I already had. -- mike salovesh PEACE !!! From Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM Mon Aug 28 16:08:06 2000 From: Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM (Mark A. Mandel) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:08:06 -0400 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Message-ID: My grandfather brought my surname from the Austro-Hungarian Empire into this country as "Mandelbaum", pronounced 'man.dL.baUm in German and 'm at n.dL.baUm in English. [a = low back unrounded vowel, L = syllabic ell, U = lax high back rounded vowel (here as offglide in diphthong), @ = low front unrounded vowel (ash, aka a-e ligature), period = syllable boundary] My father dropped the last four letters, evidently on entering the Army in WW2. I like to think that it was to avoid sounding German rather than to avoid sounding Jewish. I suppose he changed the stress at the same time, but I have no way of knowing; I only know that it has been m at n.'dEl all my life and I have never heard it any other way within the family. [E = epsilon, low-mid front unrounded vowel] Sometimes strangers mispronounce it 'm at n.dL -- on the phone, a sure indication of spam! Often people misspell it as Mandell with double ell, which is after all a more logical English spelling of this pronunciation. The surname is fairly common in the US*, and in my experience always pronounced as we pronounce it, never with initial stress. * See http://world.std.com/~mam/ , and especially http://world.std.com/~mam/why-a-test.html and http://world.std.com/~mam/index.html#not . -- Mark Mandel (rhymes with "can spell") From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Mon Aug 28 04:53:43 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:53:43 +0800 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:08 PM -0400 8/28/00, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote: >My grandfather brought my surname from the Austro-Hungarian Empire into >this country as "Mandelbaum", pronounced > 'man.dL.baUm >in German and > 'm at n.dL.baUm >in English. [a = low back unrounded vowel, L = syllabic ell, U = lax high >back rounded vowel (here as offglide in diphthong), @ = low front unrounded >vowel (ash, aka a-e ligature), period = syllable boundary] > >My father dropped the last four letters, evidently on entering the Army in >WW2. I like to think that it was to avoid sounding German rather than to >avoid sounding Jewish. I suppose he changed the stress at the same time, >but I have no way of knowing; I only know that it has been > m at n.'dEl >all my life and I have never heard it any other way within the family. [E >= epsilon, low-mid front unrounded vowel] > >Sometimes strangers mispronounce it > 'm at n.dL >-- on the phone, a sure indication of spam! Often people misspell it as > Mandell >with double ell, which is after all a more logical English spelling of this >pronunciation. > >The surname is fairly common in the US*, and in my experience always >pronounced as we pronounce it, never with initial stress. Well, he could have anglicized it to Almondtree, but then everyone would have had to decide whether or not to pronounce the L. Curiously, I've only ever heard the geneticist Gregory Mendel's name pronounced 'mEn.dL, but maybe everyone knows he was Austrian or whatever. I'm not sure the double-LL really helps either. The Mets have a relief pitcher named Turk Wendell and I've heard it pronounced with each stress pattern about half the time. (I think he actually pronounces it to rhyme with Mendel.) On the other hand, the last name of the linguist Bill Cantrell is always pronounced with final stress, possibly even by himself. L From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 28 16:59:44 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:59:44 EDT Subject: Ellis's SLANGUAGE is horrible!! (continued) Message-ID: Mike Ellis's SLANGUAGE (August 2000 publication; see also www.slanguage.com) is horrible!! It's 266 pages, $14.00. There is no bibliography. There is no mention of the American Dialect Society. There is no mention of the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN REGIONAL ENGLISH. There is no mention of the RANDOM HOUSE HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG. There is no mention of Paul Dickson. Much of the slang is ancient stuff that no one uses anymore (if anyone ever did). "New York" is on pages 80-83. The nicknames of NYC are: "N'Yawk, Big Apple, Center of the Univoice." Ellis then gives such NYC slang terms are "Silicone Alley." He doesn't even know it's SILICON Alley! This guy once wrote on slang for the NY Times! Check out the Amazon.com reviews. Three of three reviewers gave the book five stars--the highest rating! Curiously, two different people wrote the same long review! It's stated on Amazon.com that Mike Ellis is doing regional slang placemats for McDonald's. This should be a nice break for the Dictionary of American Regional English. We should all approach McDonald's and tell them the story. The Dictionary of American Regional English is scholarly. It's unfinished. It needs funding. Its founder has recently died. Instead of the Ellis crap, wouldn't McDonald's want to do something GOOD?? You can even through in my "hamburger" and "hot dog" research for free. If we're not successful with McDonald's (Your kind of place?), try Burger King! From HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU Mon Aug 28 17:10:30 2000 From: HSTAHLKE at GW.BSU.EDU (Herb Stahlke) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:10:30 -0500 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Message-ID: In one of James Garner's lesser performances, the Hallmark TV movie Decoration Day, there is a southern character named Wendell, and it's always [wen'del]. Of course, everyone in the film, Garner included, has a studied southern accent. Herb Stahlke >>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 08/27/00 11:53PM >>> Well, he could have anglicized it to Almondtree, but then everyone would have had to decide whether or not to pronounce the L. Curiously, I've only ever heard the geneticist Gregory Mendel's name pronounced 'mEn.dL, but maybe everyone knows he was Austrian or whatever. I'm not sure the double-LL really helps either. The Mets have a relief pitcher named Turk Wendell and I've heard it pronounced with each stress pattern about half the time. (I think he actually pronounces it to rhyme with Mendel.) On the other hand, the last name of the linguist Bill Cantrell is always pronounced with final stress, possibly even by himself. L From Bapopik at AOL.COM Mon Aug 28 17:48:12 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 13:48:12 EDT Subject: Copenhagen food & drink Message-ID: Greetings from a rainy New York City...It should have been "throw in" (not "through in") in that last post on SLANGUAGE. I was in Copenhagen yesterday. MAMA ROSA'S CANTINA (a Tex-Mex/Italian restaurant just off the main walking street) Coffee: Mexikansk Koffe (tequila, kahlua); Irish Coffee (whiskey); Jamaican Coffee (Tia Maria, creme de cacao); Italiensk Kaffe (sambuco); Fransk Kaffe (cognac); Bailey's med Kaffe (Bailey's); Amerikansk Kaffe. Drinks: Margarita del Ray; Margarita de Fresa; Maragarita Kiwi; San Fransisco; Factory Pina Colada; Caribbean Cooler; Blue Hawaii; Tequila Sunrise; Kirr; Martini Bianco; Martini Rosso; Martini Dry. RESTAURANT TROJKA Trojkas Kaffe--med vodka + flodeskum. CAFE AMADEUS (OTTO'S KITCHEN) (Allan Otto is advertised as the Master of Danish Food) Danish salami; Danish lamb; Danish liver pate; Danish hacked beef; Old Danish cheese with whiskey; Danish herring. IDA DAVIDSEN (OSKAR DAVIDSEN was established in 1888 and was famous for smorrebrod) The Veterinarian's Breakfast--rye bread with butter, liver pate, lard, consomme aspic, Danish salami, onion, dill. The Veterinarian's Supper--rye bread with butter, liver pate, lard, consomme aspic, saltbeef, onion, dill. The Electrician's Supper--rye bread with butter, salted pork cutlet, sauteed onions, apple, gravy. Hans Christian Andersen--rye bread with butter, crispy bacon, liver pate, consomme aspic, horseradish, parsley. Per Hendriksen--rye bread with butter, egg, tomato, cucumber, onion, mayonnaise, dill, raw egg yolk. Clipper--rye bread with butter, hand scraped beef tartare, caviar, smoked salmon, raw egg yolk. 7-11 Served scones, frosnapper prommebolle, wienerslojfe, kamme, croissant. (No Danish.) HERCEGOVINA RESTAURANT Cevapcici (minced meat) Pljeskavica (hamburger steak) BALI RESTAURANT Cocktail "Bali Punch"--Rom + blended appelsin + og ananas juice. DSB CAFE & MINIBAR (in train station) Haps Dog; Chili Dog; Luksus Frankfurter; American CheeseDog; Wienerbrod (no "Danish"); Croissant; Rundstykke; Kager; Friskbagte (muffins m/chokolade el blabaer); Ice Tea (Nestea is also "Ice Tea" here). BURGERE (burger shack) Big Dane clasic; Big Dane cheese; Big Dane bacon; Big Dane chicken; Big Dane devil (?); Big Dane garlic. MISC.: CHRISTIANSOSILD--herrings from the "Christian island." COUPE DANMARK--vanilla ice with chokolatesauce. STJERNESKUD--fried fish fillet, steamed fish fillet + prawns, served with salad on toasted bread. BEEF SKINDBUKGEN (steak) PAMIX A DANISH SPECIALTY (bits of steak) "DANISH" & THE WHITE HOUSE (continued) My congressperson is Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D). She is a good friend of both President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Maloney visits the White House often. The White House is often called "the people's house." As stated before, it might have been a White House chef (from Copenhagen) who gave us the "Danish." Rather than e-mail a swamped White House staff, I e-mailed my congresswoman and asked her if there was a White House historian who can help me find out about the White House chefs and White House menus. I said that I was a scholar who lived in her district, and that I've given a lot to my city and to my country. As ADS-L readers know by now, in my experience, unless you give politicians money, your elected representatives don't do ANYTHING for you at all. Congresswoman Maloney never responded. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Tue Aug 29 01:46:16 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 21:46:16 EDT Subject: Front-Running; Pink Sheets; DotTony Message-ID: FRONT-RUNNING From the WALL STREET JOURNAL, 28 August 2000, pg. C1, cols. 3-5: _Stock Prices Switch to Decimals From Fractions,_ _Raising Concern ABout "Front-Running" by Pros_ When the long-awaited switch to decimal from fractional stock prices in the U.S. begins today, most investors expect to benefit from narrower bid/ask spreads. But there is a potential dark side to the swtich that many investors may be unaware of. WIth stocks quoted in dollars and cents, it will mean that for as little as one cent a share, Wall Street pros will be able to step in front of public orders--in what some, including the president of the New York Stock Exchange, say amounts to "front-running." (...) A professional--a stock exchange specialist, a market maker on Nasdaq or the investor's own broker--might decide that the presence of a big buyer at $20 suggests the stock is a good buy, and "steps in front" by bidding a little more for the 500 shares. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- PINK SHEETS No, not my new bed spread. From the NEW YORK OBSERVER, "Back of the Envelope" column by Christopher Byron, August 28-September 4, 2000, pg. 32, col. 1: This is the type of individual one encounters more and more these days in what has become a whole new and growing area of abuse on Wall Street--the so-called "pink sheets" sector of the old Over the Counter market. (...) Yet nearly 5,000 penny-stock companies have escaped the crackdown by simply refusing to file audited financials. In so doing, they've become so-called non-filers that are now publicly quoted over the Internet on an electronic system maintained by the Naitonal Quotation Bureau, which has recently renamed itself Pink Sheets LLC. (...) Mr. Baldridge, the registered sex offender, comes up in all this in connection with a number of different companies that have lately been jumping in the "pinks." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DOT TONY THE OBSERVER (London), 27 August 2000, Comment by Jamie Doward, pg. 3 (Business section), cols. 6-8: _How dotTony's kiss_ _killed off Alta Vista_ Prime Minister Tony Blair is called "dotTony" because of his constant pushing of New Economy business for Britain. Dot-com companies haven't fared well in old England in recent weeks. This would make more sense, though, if the leader's name were Dorothy. From lex at W-STS.COM Tue Aug 29 05:22:22 2000 From: lex at W-STS.COM (Amy West) Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:22:22 -0700 Subject: job announcement Message-ID: The company that I'm currently freelancing for is looking for some additional help. The ad is posted on Monster.com. This is the same company that was written about in the Wall Street Journal this summer. They've moved to some nice digs in Cambridge, MA. ---Amy West US-MA-Cambridge-Lexicographer US-MA-Cambridge-Lexicographer Lexeme Inc., a fast growing natural language company, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is seeking to hire computational lexicographers to join its development group. You will be assisting in the development of the knowledge resources, working within a multidisciplinary team of linguists, engineers and programmers. Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to, the following: * Analyze text corpora in different linguistic domains; * Assist in developing and extending lexical databases; * Contribute to the creation of automatic tools for lexicographic projects; * Assist in testing and evaluating the contribution of the knowledge resources to the overall system. We are looking for people who enjoy working within a team in a fast-paced environment. The ideal candidate must be able to play an active role in the group by combining independent and creative thinking with specific project needs and deadlines. The minimal requirement is a university degree with a background in linguistics or lexicography or at least a very good knowledge of basic grammatical concepts. Lexeme will provide training on the job as well as through lectures and technical documentation. Programming experience is not required but it is a plus. Competitive salary. Additional Information Position Type: Full Time, Permanent Contact Information Joan Shulman jobs at lexeme.com Lexeme, Inc. 585 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02139 Ph: 508-358-4655 Fax: 508-358-4655 From janivars at BAHNHOF.SE Tue Aug 29 19:27:49 2000 From: janivars at BAHNHOF.SE (Jan Ivarsson) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 21:27:49 +0200 Subject: Stress patterns on words spelled with final Herb Stahlke writes: "A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words ending orthographically in . Surnames and one or two other words are showing up with final stress. It's pretty universal with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]..." Like Dennis R. Preston, "I see no reason to doubt that it is modeled on French for the obvious cultural stereotypes", at least not in many cases. This is certainly true for , which, by the way, is how members of the Nobel family pronounce their name. Thus, in this case, the stress is not a recent development in American English, but a perfectly correct pronunciation. In Sweden, there are many other names ending in -el or -ell (e.g. Sergel, Mankell, Kernell, von Dardel, de Dardel), but the spelling gives no clue to the stress: <'sEr.gel> or , <'mAn.kel>, , , . You simply have to know. In other cases, the American stress change is certainly due to a lack of knowledge of the pronunciation in the original language (e.g. Trendelenberg), sometimes adopted even by the bearers of the name, e.g. the CNN news anchor Mr. Begleiter, pronounced by everyone on the channel (thus presumably by himself) <'bEg.lai.ter>, even though the German prefix be- is always unstressed. Jan Ivarsson, Sweden -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From AAllan at AOL.COM Tue Aug 29 20:23:42 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 16:23:42 EDT Subject: Australian word: whinge Message-ID: >From _The Australian_ http://news.com.au:80/common/story_page/0,4057,1130556%255E1683,00.html All whinge and no action defines who we are By SUSAN MITCHELL 28aug00 IN this land of "no worries", next to a good laugh we love to have a whinge. Sometimes it can go on for days; weeks, even. Often it's the same whinge, told to as many different ears as we can bash. Whinging in Australia is a form of bonding. Nothing like a shared whinge to make you feel less alone in this vast country. Perhaps that's why we love it so much. Perhaps it came over with the first white inhabitants. No doubt the first thing they did was have a whinge about the heat and the flies. The Macquarie Dictionary defines a whinger as someone who complains or whines. The whine element is important because it involves a nasal sound peculiar to our accent. It also means "to complain in a feeble, plaintive way". . . . . All of this helps explain the launch of a new website, Whinger.com, which promises "your whinge is our command". LOG on, have a good whinge and for $8.25 the company will contact the source of your complaint, attempt to get something in return -- like a free meal or a free lube from a garage or an apology. If it doesn't, it will stick the offender on the website for public humiliation. . . . . - Allan Metcalf From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Tue Aug 29 22:56:53 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 17:56:53 -0500 Subject: foutre In-Reply-To: <199906230310.UAA20318@Turing.Stanford.EDU> Message-ID: Toward the end of May, 1823, New York City was stood on its ear by excitement over a horserace. A troop of outstanding racers were brought into the city from Virginia, headed by a horse named Sir Henry and including a horse named Flying Childers. They were to be matched against horses from the north, Sir Henry to be challenged by a horse named Eclipse. (Flying Childers and Eclipse both had borrowed their names from famous 18th century English horses.) Extraordingary sums were said to have been bet. The New York newspapers were full of the story, both during the race meet and for a week or more before. One paper said that the population of the town had been doubled by the number of people who had come to see the event. Another amused its readers by picturing these visitors trundling their luggage down the streets, knocking on every door with a sign "Boarders Taken" in the window, and finding that all beds were bespoken. Another paper published a whimsical letter from "A Yankee" describing the excitement. The letter represented a French barber exclaiming "foutre, foutre, Eclipse, bon Flying Childers." Now, I believe that "foutre" does not have the resonance to the French that its English equivalent has -- or had -- to Americans. Just the same, I am surprised to see "foutre" in print in a general circulation newspaper at that date. I would suppose that a reasonable number of the New Yorkers likely to subscribe to a newspaper would know the word, and would naturally translate it as "fuck" and find it offensive. It is possible that A Yankee was playing a prank on the newspaper editor and taking advantage of his ignorance. But I noticed nothing in subsequent days in this paper nor in several rival papers expressing apologies, or indignation, or any other reaction. It's also true that these newspapers offer 2 or 3 square feet of often one sentence or one paragraph stories in small type and without headlines, so stuff is very easy to miss. Have any of the lexicographers among us anything in their files to indicate when "foutre" or its derivitives, like "foutu" or "Je m'en foutisme" first found their way into respectable English language publications? I notice that the OED has "Je m'en fous" from an Arnold Bennett novel of 1928. The source of this passaage was The Statesman, May 26, 1823, p. 2, col. 4 GAT From thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU Tue Aug 29 23:29:07 2000 From: thompsng at ELMER4.BOBST.NYU.EDU (GEORGE THOMPSON) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 18:29:07 -0500 Subject: Americanisms, 1823 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In 1823, the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser copied "A Provincial Dictionary for the convenience of Emigrants" from the Mississippi Intelligencer. This glossary was reprinted in American Dialect Notes. vol. 4, pp. 46-48, as taken from the National Intelligencer of May 1, 1823. It is in two sections: Western Dialect (31 words, many merely variant pronunciations, like barr, crap and drap, for bear, crop and drop, but also fanent, opposite; pater, to amble along; carry, to lead a quadruped; and coppen, the enclosure within which milch-cows are kept) and Yankee Dialect (19 words, including spatter, a comparative word, "as thick as spatter".) A week later, the NYGGA printed an very interesting letter signed "Philologus" in response to this glossary. He cites 11 of the words, with the definitions, and indicates that all are to be found in either Bailey's or Johnson's dictionaries. In short, they are not Americanisms, but English provincialisms. He further observes "'Fanent, opposite' . . . is used . . . only by emigrants from the North of Ireland." This agrees with the note in DARE (under fornent). Suspecting that this glossary had been compiled by one of those tiresome Englishmen who come over here hunting for instances of American barbarity to send to the folks back home and confirm them in their prejudices, Philologus gives a list of words "made use of in [England], which are probably little known here. These I extract from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in London for the benefit of his majesty's subjects in general." He chooses 28 words, including fubsey, plump, (which Greg Downing, at least, will remember as part of Stephen Dedalus's vocabulary) gob, the mouth, and glum, sullen. Presumably the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is not the original mid-18th century edition by Francis Grose, but is Pierce Egan's version of 1823; if so, Philologus had obtained a copy very promptly. If other copies were available in the U. S., then the authenticity, as a demonstration of American familiarity with English slang, of the essay from the mid 1820s in corinthian slang I've posted here some time back, would be questionable. The "Provincial Dictionary" was in the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, May 10, 1823; the letter from Philologus was in NYGGA, May 16, 1823, p. 2, cols. 2-3. GAT From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Wed Aug 30 00:24:46 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 20:24:46 -0400 Subject: Americanisms, 1823 Message-ID: At 06:29 PM 8/29/2000, George Thompson () wrote: >...Philologus gives a list of words "made use of in >[England], which are probably little known here. These I extract >from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in London for the >benefit of his majesty's subjects in general." He chooses 28 words, >including fubsey, plump, (which Greg Downing, at least, will remember >as part of Stephen Dedalus's vocabulary) gob, the mouth, and glum, >sullen. "Plump" is definitely part of the narrator's vocabulary, though not necessarily Stephen's, in the passage to which you refer (the book's incipit). Actually, fubsy (sic), gob, and glum all occur in the book. Isn't it a well-known fact that the whole of OED1 is in _Ulysses_, unhelpfully jumbled out of alphabetical order? There's even that big patch of Americanisms in the coda to episode 14, a passage I discussed at some length as part of the Zurich Joyce Center workshop week earlier this month. I trust all's going well with you, George. Best, Greg D. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 02:27:46 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 22:27:46 -0400 Subject: foutre Message-ID: GEORGE THOMPSON wrote: > > ... > > Have any of the lexicographers among us anything in their files to > indicate when "foutre" or its derivitives, like "foutu" or "Je m'en > foutisme" first found their way into respectable English language > publications? I notice that the OED has "Je m'en fous" from an > Arnold Bennett novel of 1928. > The OED quotes Shakespeare, "Henry IV", 1597: "A foutre for the world ...". There is an earlier citation, but it seems to be in French. [I note that there is a piece in the 'classical' piano repertoire -- by Rossini? -- in which the score calls for the pianist to say "foutre" a few times. I don't know just how offensive this would have been, there and then.] Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I don't give a hoot"? (^_^) -- Doug Wilson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mlee303 at YAHOO.COM Wed Aug 30 10:11:21 2000 From: mlee303 at YAHOO.COM (Margaret Lee) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 03:11:21 -0700 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: If it's not too late to respond to this: semantic shift occurs when a word's original meaning changes completly. When a word's meaning is expanded to include not only its original meaning, but additional meaning, the process is known as *broadening*. --- Kathleen Miller wrote: > > Mr. Safire is writing a special issue on Noo Yawkese > and we're stuck with a > lingusitic question. What is it called when a > phrase, such as "get out of > here", assumes a different meaning? Is it sematic > shift, or is there another > name for it? > > > Kathleen E. Miller > Research Assistant to William Safire > The New York Times > > "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It > is only with the heart > that one can see rightly; what is essential is > invisible to the > eye." Antoine de Saint-Exupery ===== Margaret G. Lee, Ph.D. Associate Professor - English and Linguistics & University Editor Department of English Hampton University, Hampton, VA 23668 Office:(757)727-5769; FAX:(757)727-5421; Home:(757)851-5773 e-mail: mlee303 at yahoo.com or margaret.lee at hamptonu.edu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM Wed Aug 30 11:19:16 2000 From: ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM (Barnhart) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 07:19:16 -0400 Subject: Semantic Shift? Message-ID: Doesn't it also include narrowing and perhaps another category--transfer--in which the application of the term is taken over to a new category of activity? Some people may call the first two generalization and specialization. Regards, David David K. Barnhart, Editor The Barnhart Dictionary Companion [quarterly] barnhart at highlands.com www.highlands.com/Lexik "Necessity obliges us to neologize." Thomas Jefferson-August 16, 1813 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 30 10:41:34 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 06:41:34 EDT Subject: Chastity Timer; Big Apple--Top of the Barrel Message-ID: CHASTITY TIMER From the NEW YORK POST, 29 August 2000, "High-tech chastity belt: It's about 'time,'" pg. 5, col. 1: The electronic device--attached to the elastic of a regular pair of men's or women's underpants--records the frequency and length of time an undergarment (Col. 2--ed.) is removed, London's Guardian newspaper reported. (...) The device, called a "chastity timer," would have an exact record of the period of time during which a person might have been cheating. What'll they think of next? How did we ever live without this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- BIG APPLE--TOP OF THE BARREL Gerald Cohen surely doesn't want all this. From the MAIL AND EXPRESS (NY), 26 September 1885, pg. 5, col. 4: (Big Apple drawing--ed.) This is an apple, large and round. At the top of the barrel always found. (Small Apple drawing--ed.) This is an apple, small and mean. Always at the bottom seen. --_Bridgewater Independent_. This item also made several other papers. I have similar observations to this in later years. "Big Apples" are "top of the barrel." According to Christine Ammer's AHDOI, "top of the barrel" and "(scrape the) bottom of the barrel" didn't come around until the early 1900s. I have no idea what Fred Shapiro has. "King Apple" was a 1923 article I recently found in AMERICAN COOKERY. The history of apples was given. There was a paragraph about apples in New York City restaurants. No "Big Apple." The NEW YORK HOTEL RECORD (together with the RESTAURANT WORLD) specifically covered New York City restaurants and hotels. "Peet Tells the Apple Pack Story," 23 November 1923, pg. 5+, was a nice, long article about upstate New York apple growing and New York City apple eating. No "Big Apple." Again: Two months ago, the New York Times's official position was that John J. Fitz Gerald "AT MOST, popularized the phrase." I was told that "NYC=Big Apple" was widely known since 1909. I was told that I deserved no apology whatsoever. Will that change in about two weeks? From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 12:40:32 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 13:40:32 +0100 Subject: Australian word: whinge Message-ID: > From: AAllan at AOL.COM > >From _The Australian_ > http://news.com.au:80/common/story_page/0,4057,1130556%255E1683,00.html > > All whinge and no action defines who we are > By SUSAN MITCHELL > 28aug00 > > IN this land of "no worries", next to a good laugh we love to have a whinge. > Sometimes it can go on for days; weeks, even. Often it's the same whinge, > told to as many different ears as we can bash. 'Whinge' isn't an Australian word--it's general British English. I first learnt it in South Africa. Lynne Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK From jessie at SIRSI.COM Wed Aug 30 15:01:07 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 10:01:07 -0500 Subject: whinge Message-ID: This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when "whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. Jessie Emerson From jester at PANIX.COM Wed Aug 30 15:01:11 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:01:11 -0400 Subject: whinge In-Reply-To: <006201c01293$20629d00$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> from "Jessie Emerson" at Aug 30, 2000 10:01:07 AM Message-ID: > This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when > "whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, > but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. OED records it from a1150.... Jesse Sheidlower From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 03:17:57 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:17:57 +0800 Subject: "skivvies" (cross-post from Linguist List) Message-ID: f.y.i. Please send comments to the poster (Mr. Wilson, at the address below) as well as to ads-l. larry ------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-11-1819. Tue Aug 29 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875. Subject: 11.1819, Qs: Etymology of "Skivvies",Survey on Spanish ======= Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 06:38:30 -0400 From: "Douglas G. Wilson" Subject: Etymology of the word "Skivvies" I am researching the etymology and connections of the word 'skivvies'/'skivvy' = 'underwear'. I have consulted the major dictionaries (none of which gives even a speculative etymology) and conventional reference books, and I've searched the Web. I have seen various spellings: 'scivey', 'skibbies', etc. This word is perhaps more interesting than one might think initially. Can anyone help me? In particular, has there been a thorough examination of this word in the published literature? The word 'skivvies' in the sense '(naval) underwear' goes back at least to 1927 in the US. 'Skivvy' is also used for 'pullover' (shirt/sweater), particularly in Australia. The singular noun 'skivvy' apparently = 'T-shirt' in the US Navy. Possible connections/conflations include: 'skivvy' = 'flunky' ('menial laborer') [mostly non-US, ca. 1900 to date] 'Skib'/'Skibby' = 'Jap[anese]' [derogatory US military slang, WW II] 'skibby'/'skippy' = 'Asian prostitute' [US slang, from early 1900's] 'skippy'/'skibby' = '[effeminate] homosexual [man]' [US slang] '[get] the skivvy on ...' = '[get] the skinny on ...' = '[get] the facts on ...' [US slang] 'skivvy girl' = ? [US military slang, Vietnam] 'skivvy house' = 'whorehouse' [US military slang] 'skivvy niners' = US Air Force intelligence unit personnel (including linguists!) [USAF slang] 'skivvies' = 'sandals'/'slippers' (?= 'scuffies') [US slang] etc., etc. I would be interested in information on any of these items and any similar ones. At least one possible connection outside the English language suggests itself. Specific questions: (1) Is there (or was there ever) a slang expression 'skivvy' meaning something like 'swabby' or 'sailor'? (2) Was "Skivvies" ever *used* as a trademark (registered or not) for underwear? If so, when, where, and by whom? I will present a summary. - Doug Wilson From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 15:21:48 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 16:21:48 +0100 Subject: whinge In-Reply-To: <006201c01293$20629d00$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: >This is probably documented somewhere, but does anyone know off hand when >"whinge" entered the language in GB? I first heard it in the early/mid 80s, >but I had the impression that it had been around a lot longer. > >Jessie Emerson I think we actually had this conversation before when I was in SA (we repeat ourselves a lot here, don't we?). It goes back to Middle English--OED has citations back to and fairly continuously from 1150. This isn't a new word. Lynne -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 03:29:24 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:29:24 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <39AC7122.4050502@nb.net> Message-ID: At 10:27 PM -0400 8/29/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I >don't give a hoot"? (^_^) > Not sure; this is one of an indefinitely large catalogue of expressions of minimal quantity used (in English and many other languages) in negative polarity contexts as what Bolinger called 'stereotyped equivalents of ANY'. The OED isn't sure, either, suggesting a possible link with either the owl's interjectional hoot or the noun denoting 'a short outcry', attested since 1600, but it also signals a connection with "hooter", attested earlier in the same range of negative contexts, including the following. (Note that the 1839 citation includes two polarity items in the same expression.) 1839 Havana (N.Y.) Republican 21 Aug. (Th.), Now the Grampus [sc. a vessel] stopt, and didn't buge [= budge] one hooter. 1889 Commercial (Cincinnati) 17 Oct., It has not harmed the Republican cause in Ohio a hooter. 1896 Harper's Mag. XCII. 784/1 Now I can have all I want, I don't care a hooter! 1900 E. A. Dix Deacon Bradbury xii, `Do you mean that you don't know anything about the matter at all?'..`Not a hooter.' as for "hoot" itself, the first cite in the OED for the relevant item (hoot-2) is the only one that does not include a negative context, for what it's worth: 1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds xxxviii. 615, I got onto my reaper and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night. larry From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 15:37:51 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:37:51 -0400 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 11:29 AM 8/30/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 10:27 PM -0400 8/29/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >>Question: What is the real origin of 'hoot' in the expression "I >>don't give a hoot"? (^_^) >Not sure; this is one of an indefinitely large catalogue of >expressions of minimal quantity used (in English and many other >languages) in negative polarity contexts as what Bolinger called >'stereotyped equivalents of ANY'. The OED isn't sure, either, >suggesting a possible link with either the owl's interjectional hoot >or the noun denoting 'a short outcry', attested since 1600, but it >also signals a connection with "hooter", attested earlier in the same >range of negative contexts, including the following. (Note that the >1839 citation includes two polarity items in the same expression.) > >1839 Havana (N.Y.) Republican 21 Aug. (Th.), Now the Grampus [sc. a >vessel] stopt, and didn't buge [= budge] one hooter. > >1889 Commercial (Cincinnati) 17 Oct., It has not harmed the >Republican cause in Ohio a hooter. > >1896 Harper's Mag. XCII. 784/1 Now I can have all I want, I don't >care a hooter! > >1900 E. A. Dix Deacon Bradbury xii, `Do you mean that you don't know >anything about the matter at all?'..`Not a hooter.' > >as for "hoot" itself, the first cite in the OED for the relevant item >(hoot-2) is the only one that does not include a negative context, >for what it's worth: > >1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds xxxviii. 615, I got onto my reaper >and banged down every hoot of it before Monday night. > >larry Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration of 'foutre'? Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. -- Doug Wilson From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 04:11:04 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 12:11:04 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000830113137.00a88a60@nb.net> Message-ID: At 11:37 AM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration >of 'foutre'? > >Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. > >But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional >references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. > No reason to doubt it, and no particular reason to believe it, without further evidence. As I mentioned in my last note, there are hundreds of nouns that occur or have occurred in the frame "X doesn't care/give a ___" and their semantic and phonological range is impressively wide. "Fout(re)" isn't particularly closer phonologically to "hoot" than, say, "jot" is, and obscenities like 'fuck', 'shit', and 'damn' constitute just one of many sources of such minima. I'm not saying your derivation is impossible, I'm just saying that there are alternate explanations and, as far as I know, no particular evidence for yours. (Incidentally, the "fuck all" construction you cite isn't relevant, unless you can find "I don't know {hoot(er) all/ foutre all} about it" as well.) larry From Bapopik at AOL.COM Wed Aug 30 17:09:12 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 13:09:12 EDT Subject: Brand Trains Message-ID: From the VILLAGE VOICE, 29 August 2000, pg. 28, col. 1: When a company swallows halves of subway cars and plasters them with identical ads, the biz calls these "brand trains." Tristate tech start-ups shell out $150,000 apiece for monthly placement in a single car on 10 percent of the city's fleet. That seems expensive to me. You have to sell a lot of "Fruitopia" (one campaign that ran in the subway) to cover it. From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed Aug 30 17:19:12 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 18:19:12 +0100 Subject: Brand Trains In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Barry said: > From the VILLAGE VOICE, 29 August 2000, pg. 28, col. 1: > > When a company swallows halves of subway cars and plasters them >with identical ads, the biz calls these "brand trains." Tristate >tech start-ups shell out $150,000 apiece for monthly placement in a >single car on 10 percent of the city's fleet. > > That seems expensive to me. You have to sell a lot of >"Fruitopia" (one campaign that ran in the subway) to cover it. No, you just have to sell a lot of Coca-Cola, since they own Fruitopia. And since they already sell a lot of Coke, they can afford ridiculous campaigns for their smaller brands. Incidentally, Coke was sued by a group of high school students who had come up with the ideas behind Fruitopia (including the name) in some sort of teen enterprise class (or camp or something) that was peopled with Coke reps. I think the kids won. -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From douglas at NB.NET Wed Aug 30 18:11:12 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:11:12 -0400 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:11 PM 8/30/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 11:37 AM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >> >>Then is there any reason to doubt that 'hoot[er]' is an alteration >>of 'foutre'? >> >>Cf. "I don't give a f*ck.", "I don't know f*ck all about it.", etc. >> >>But is this speculative connection presented in the conventional >>references? I haven't seen it myself AFAIK. >No reason to doubt it, and no particular reason to believe it, >without further evidence. As I mentioned in my last note, there are >hundreds of nouns that occur or have occurred in the frame >"X doesn't care/give a ___" >and their semantic and phonological range is impressively wide. >"Fout(re)" isn't particularly closer phonologically to "hoot" than, >say, "jot" is, and obscenities like 'fuck', 'shit', and 'damn' >constitute just one of many sources of such minima. I'm not saying >your derivation is impossible, I'm just saying that there are >alternate explanations and, as far as I know, no particular evidence >for yours. (Incidentally, the "fuck all" construction you cite isn't >relevant, unless you can find "I don't know {hoot(er) all/ foutre >all} about it" as well.) Well, it's only a speculation off the top of my head, and I am not trying to sell it too strongly. However ... (1) "I don't give ...": In my own experience, the likely choices include "a damn" (plus euphemisms "a darn" etc.), "a shit", "two shits", "a f*ck", "a rat's ass", "a hoot", "two hoots", etc. All rude, except for "hoot" .... I don't hear "a jot", "a tittle", "a peep", "a squeak", etc., in this expression. I think there's some tendency to want a rude expression here, rather than a diminutive or an animal sound. [Incidentally, "not give a damn" is thought by some to derive from "not give a dam", a dam being a small unit of currency in India. Is this derivation legitimate, or is it an elevated type of 'folk etymology'?] (2) I think "fout[re]" is closer to "hoot[er]" than other things such as "jot" are. [But perhaps I'm influenced by Japanese, where 'fu' and 'hu' are absolutely identical (with bilabial 'f') ... Does bilabial 'f' occur in some varieties of French, BTW?] (3) "F*ck all" is not analogous word-for-word, but it's another example of the popular desire for a rude word in a certain context. "He doesn't know ..." (intensive) is filled (in my experience) by "shit" ("diddly", "doodly", "squat", "beans" euphemisms for this, I think), "f*ck all" (occasionally "f*ck" alone), "bugger all", etc. Perhaps "zilch", "zip" are exceptions, perhaps partly euphemisms. For those sensitive individuals who object not only to rude words but also to their transparent euphemisms, 'hoot' might be the only polite way to fill "I don't give a ..." -- perhaps because 'foutre' is no longer recognizable to the average English-speaker, so that 'hoot' is no longer recognized as its alteration or euphemism. Next time I get over to the big library, I'll see if I can find any convincing substantiation or refutation of my tentative hypothesis! -- Doug From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Wed Aug 30 07:13:38 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 15:13:38 +0800 Subject: hoot(er) (was: foutre) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000830123359.00a92200@nb.net> Message-ID: At 2:11 PM -0400 8/30/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >Well, it's only a speculation off the top of my head, and I am not trying >to sell it too strongly. However ... > >(1) "I don't give ...": In my own experience, the likely choices include "a >damn" (plus euphemisms "a darn" etc.), "a shit", "two shits", "a f*ck", "a >rat's ass", "a hoot", "two hoots", etc. All rude, except for "hoot" .... I >don't hear "a jot", "a tittle", "a peep", "a squeak", etc., in this >expression. I think there's some tendency to want a rude expression here, >rather than a diminutive or an animal sound. > >[Incidentally, "not give a damn" is thought by some to derive from "not >give a dam", a dam being a small unit of currency in India. Is this >derivation legitimate, or is it an elevated type of 'folk etymology'?] > >(2) I think "fout[re]" is closer to "hoot[er]" than other things such as >"jot" are. [But perhaps I'm influenced by Japanese, where 'fu' and 'hu' are >absolutely identical (with bilabial 'f') ... Does bilabial 'f' occur in >some varieties of French, BTW?] > >(3) "F*ck all" is not analogous word-for-word, but it's another example of >the popular desire for a rude word in a certain context. "He doesn't know >..." (intensive) is filled (in my experience) by "shit" ("diddly", >"doodly", "squat", "beans" euphemisms for this, I think), "f*ck all" >(occasionally "f*ck" alone), "bugger all", etc. Perhaps "zilch", "zip" are >exceptions, perhaps partly euphemisms. > >For those sensitive individuals who object not only to rude words but also >to their transparent euphemisms, 'hoot' might be the only polite way to >fill "I don't give a ..." -- perhaps because 'foutre' is no longer >recognizable to the average English-speaker, so that 'hoot' is no longer >recognized as its alteration or euphemism. > OK, I'm open to persuasion. But I thought we were talking about how these expressions evolved rather than which expressions are likely to be uttered today, so the evidence I was alluding to is germane. This discussion is reproduced from my 1989 book, _A Natural History of Negation_, p. 400: =============== Minimizers, those 'partially stereotyped equivalents of any' (Bolinger 1972: 121; cf. 6.4 above), occur within the scope of a negation as a way of reinforcing that negation. As far back as Pott (1857: 410), linguists have recognized this function of positive expressions denoting small or negligeable quantities, often incorporating a sense of scorn or ridicule, which Pott sees as implicitly evoking the formula nicht einmal das 'not even...'; cf. also Schmerling 1971, Horn 1971, Fauconnier 1975a,b, Heim 1984. Impressive, though hardly exhaustive, inventories of NPI minimizers specialized for this function are given by Pott (1857: 410-11) and Wagenaar (1930: 74-5). Their examples--from Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Old Spanish, Italian, English, Dutch, German, and Slavic--include minimal quantities from the culinary domain (= 'not a cherrystone, a chestnut, a crumb, an egg, a fava, a fig, a garlic, a grain, a leek, an oyster, a parsnip, a pea,...'), coins of little value (='not a dinero, sou,...' [cf. not a red cent, plugged nickel, thin dime]), animals and body parts (='not a cat's tail, a hair, a mosquito, a lobster[!], a sparrow'), and other objects of little value and/or salience (='not an accent , an atom, a nail, a pinecone, a point, a shred, a splinter, a straw'). Indeed, it would appear that any entity whose extension is small enough to be regarded as atomic in an accessible set of contexts can be used productively in this frame as a means of negative reinforcement. Nor is this tendency by any means restricted to Indo-European. Negative-polarity minimizers occur as negation strengtheners in Basque (cf. Lafitte 1962), in Japanese (cf. McGloin 1976: 397-419), and in many other languages. =============== Now the syntactic frame will narrow down the class of possible fillers, so that "not worth ___" will differ from "not give (a) _____", which will differ from "not care (a) _____", which will differ from "not know ___ about", but it should be noted that it's not only or even primarily obscenities that occur here. In fact, the standard French negative markers "PAS", "RIEN", etc. originated in just this way ('I didn't walk a step', as in Eng. 'I didn't sleep a wink'). The class of squatitives you mention--(diddly) squat, shit, fuck-all, zip, zilch--are in some ways the modern English analogues of Fr. PAS. Incidentally, Dutch is even more creative than English in its invocation of negative polarity drecatives, allowing for colloquial sentences translating literally as 'Nobody understood a {scrotum/ball/hole/testicle/sodomite/devil} of it', as Gertjan Postma has discussed. I'm still not convinced about the "foutre" > "hoot(er)" move, though, especially since the alternation of the initial consonants is less plausible in English and French than in Japanese. larry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Aug 31 05:55:52 2000 From: rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU (Rudolph C Troike) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 22:55:52 -0700 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: <39AC476B0001BF48@phobos.email.Arizona.EDU> Message-ID: Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the process of transmission from French to English. Rudy From gcohen at UMR.EDU Thu Aug 31 02:55:47 2000 From: gcohen at UMR.EDU (Gerald Cohen) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 20:55:47 -0600 Subject: Big Apple info from B. Popik Message-ID: In an Aug. 30 message Barry Popik wrote: > Gerald Cohen surely doesn't want all this. > From the MAIL AND EXPRESS (NY), 26 September 1885, pg. 5, col. 4: > [There then follows various information pertaining to the non-existence of "The Big Apple" as an early nickname of NYC.] ----Actually I am interested in all of Barry's new information about "The Big Apple." I believe that my monograph _Origin of New York City's Nickname "The Big Apple"_ (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1991) already presents the evidence that prior to 1927 "The Big Apple" was not used as a nickname for NYC. (The 1909 attestation, as already mentioned, is completely isolated and almost certainly means "overweaning big shot.") But additional negative evidence cannot hurt. The search for "The Big Apple" as a nickname for NYC around, say, 1910, is a search for the will o' the wisp, and Barry's additional negative evidence reinforces this conclusion. I will write a check of $100 to the first person who can provide me an attestation of "The Big Apple" as a nickname for NYC prior to 1920 (excluding Edward Martin's controversial 1909 quote). This is a serious offer, but I see my money as safe as if it were in the bank. ----Gerald Cohen gcohen at umr.edu From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 00:17:11 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 08:17:11 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:55 PM -0700 8/30/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] >is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: >hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the >acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to >interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could >have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the >process of transmission from French to English. > It is indeed phonetically plausible on general grounds, and if we were talking about a Spanish borrowing from French, rather than an English one, I would need little convincing. But can anyone cite a single example of a French loan with [f] being borrowed into English with [h]? larry From douglas at NB.NET Thu Aug 31 13:37:18 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 09:37:18 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 08:17 AM 8/31/00 +0800, you wrote: >At 10:55 PM -0700 8/30/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote: >>Some plausibility is added to this derivation by the fact that [f] > [h] >>is a well-known sound change in Romance (filio: hijo, ferrocarril: >>hierro, to cite Spanish examples). As Chomsky and Halle pointed out, the >>acoustic similarities of labials and velars makes them subject to >>interchange (cf. the history of English /x/ in "laugh"). The change could >>have occurred in a regional variety of French (Norman French?) or in the >>process of transmission from French to English. >It is indeed phonetically plausible on general grounds, and if we >were talking about a Spanish borrowing from French, rather than an >English one, I would need little convincing. But can anyone cite a >single example of a French loan with [f] being borrowed into English >with [h]? We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: 'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example (although "archaic"). The possibilities here include (1) English 'fouter' /futR/ > 'hooter' /hutR/ and (2) a re-borrowing in a non-literary (originally vocal) context (French 'foutre' > English 'hooter'), perhaps ca. 1800. In the second case the question is whether the French exclamation 'foutre' could be heard by an English speaker as ''hoot'/'hooter'. I think this is marginal, but more plausible if bilabial 'f' is employed. (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps prejudice one against the adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) Favoring this possibility is the coexistence of 'hoot' AND 'hooter' which I think are exactly the two expected realizations in English of French 'foutre', IF /f/ > /h/ is permitted. In the first case, the change might have been deliberate and euphemistic. It wouldn't be the most likely alteration IMHO, but there are reasons to reject some of the more likely alterations such as 'futter', 'footer'. In this case 'hooter' probably > 'hoot' at a later date. There is the possible analogy of 'phooey'/'hooey'. Another question would be whether 'houtre' or something like it might occur in French as a euphemism for 'foutre'. I'm going over to the library. Maybe I can find Larry Horn's book! -- Doug From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 14:01:36 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:01:36 EDT Subject: Rural Louisiana ? Message-ID: Here's a request for help - >> I was wondering if you have any sources or information on the rural Louisiana dialects. Not Cajun or Creole, but "regular" rural dialects. I am researching this for a film. Thank you. Sincerely, John Nelles << If you have suggestions, please notify him at jenelles at attcanada.ca as well as posting them to ADS-L. Thanks - Allan Metcalf From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 02:04:13 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:04:13 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20000831084824.00a90d60@nb.net> Message-ID: At 9:37 AM -0400 8/31/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: > >We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: >'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example >(although "archaic"). > Not only does it appear, but it appears in precisely the contexts we're discussing (inter alia). Here's the OED: ============= fouter fouter fu.t. Forms: 6-7 footra, footre, fowtre, 7 foutra, foutree, foutir, 9 fouter. [a. OFr. foutre:-L. futuere (the inf. used subst.). ] 1. In phrases, a foutre for, (to care) not a fouter. A. 1592 Greene James IV, v. ii, Jaques..faites bonne chere: foutre de ce monde! 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, v. iii. 103 A footra [Q. footre] for the World, and Worldlings base. 1622 Fletcher Sea Voy. v. i, Therefore footra, When I am full, let 'em hang me, I care not. 1638 Suckling Goblins iii. (1646) 26 Shall I so?-why then foutree for the Guise. 1871 R. Ellis Catullus xvii. 17 He leaves her alone to romp idly, cares not a fouter. 2. Applied contemptuously to persons. 1780-1808 J. Mayne Siller Gun iii. xxv, The astonish'd tailor..swearing he was better stuff Than sick a fouter. 1786 Harvest Rig in R. Chambers' Pop. Poems Scotl. (1862) 50 A sutor, Most manfully about does lay-A tough auld fouter. 1833 Marryat P. Simple (1863) 145 O'Brien declared that he was a liar, and a cowardly foutre. =============== although there's only one cite (the 1871 rendering of Catullus), the OED implies this was a standard use. Of course, the semantics are right--we've already discussed the parallel "not care a fuck" at some length. As noted, the real question is whether "hoot(er)" is an alternate form of "foutre" in this or any other context, and by extension whether there's any evidence that a French [f] ever turns into an English [h], much less any direct evidence that "hoot(er)" ever substitutes for "foutre" in other contexts, such as (2) above ("a tough old hooter") or the interjectional uses in (1) ("a hooter for the world"). > (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps >prejudice one against the > adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) I don't find this argument from homonymy avoidance too persuasive in this context, given the difference in the vowels and in the semantics, and given the independent evidence for the persistence of the obscene borrowing "foutre" (in its various spellings). larry From preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU Thu Aug 31 14:12:55 2000 From: preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU (Dennis R. Preston) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:12:55 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Besides, "hoot" is well-known as an alternative for "poot" (fart) and not to give one of those is equally well-known. I'm for "hoot" = "fart" (while we are in the area of speculation). dInIs >At 9:37 AM -0400 8/31/00, Douglas G. Wilson wrote: >> >>We know how French 'foutre' appears in English, since about 1585: >>'fouter'/'foutre'/'foutra', still in the RH dictionary for example >>(although "archaic"). >> >Not only does it appear, but it appears in precisely the contexts >we're discussing (inter alia). Here's the OED: >============= >fouter > >fouter fu.t. Forms: 6-7 footra, footre, fowtre, 7 foutra, foutree, >foutir, 9 fouter. [a. OFr. foutre:-L. futuere (the inf. used subst.). >] > >1. In phrases, > >a foutre for, (to care) not a fouter. > > A. 1592 Greene James IV, v. ii, Jaques..faites bonne chere: >foutre de ce monde! > > 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, v. iii. 103 A footra [Q. footre] for >the World, and Worldlings base. > > 1622 Fletcher Sea Voy. v. i, Therefore footra, When I am full, >let 'em hang me, I care not. > > 1638 Suckling Goblins iii. (1646) 26 Shall I so?-why then >foutree for the Guise. > > 1871 R. Ellis Catullus xvii. 17 He leaves her alone to romp >idly, cares not a fouter. > >2. Applied contemptuously to persons. > > 1780-1808 J. Mayne Siller Gun iii. xxv, The astonish'd >tailor..swearing he was better stuff Than sick a fouter. > > 1786 Harvest Rig in R. Chambers' Pop. Poems Scotl. (1862) 50 A >sutor, Most manfully about does lay-A tough auld fouter. > > 1833 Marryat P. Simple (1863) 145 O'Brien declared that he was >a liar, and a cowardly foutre. >=============== >although there's only one cite (the 1871 rendering of Catullus), the >OED implies this was a standard use. Of course, the semantics are >right--we've already discussed the parallel "not care a fuck" at some >length. As noted, the real question is whether "hoot(er)" is an >alternate form of "foutre" in this or any other context, and by >extension whether there's any evidence that a French [f] ever turns >into an English [h], much less any direct evidence that "hoot(er)" >ever substitutes for "foutre" in other contexts, such as (2) above >("a tough old hooter") or the interjectional uses in (1) ("a hooter >for the world"). > >> (The presence of the common word 'foot' /fUt/ will perhaps >>prejudice one against the >> adoption of 'foot' /fut/; possibly 'hoot' /hut/ is 2nd choice.) > >I don't find this argument from homonymy avoidance too persuasive in >this context, given the difference in the vowels and in the >semantics, and given the independent evidence for the persistence of >the obscene borrowing "foutre" (in its various spellings). > >larry Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston at pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)353-0740 Fax: (517)432-2736 From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 15:08:30 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:08:30 EDT Subject: New Economy; Sandalistas; Dog; Morning After Pill; Indonesian Food Message-ID: The latest DSNA NEWSLETTER (Spring 2000?) has a nice hot pic on page two of Henry Ludwig McKean Gerharz. But why only one (ahem) DSNA baby photo? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- NEW ECONOMY From the FINANCIAL TIMES, 30 August 2000, pg. 10, col. 4: City analysts have acknowledged this by creating a new industry category: "new economy" companies. Coined in New York, this expression signals to investors that they should treat dotcoms differently. "New Economy" was coined in New York? Not in Silicon Valley? Not by a book that used that title in the 1980s? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- SANDALISTAS (REVOLUTIONARY TOURISTS) From the NEW YORK POST, 31 August 2000, editorial about Peru's treatment of Lori Berenson, pg. 30, col. 1: ...would-be American revolutionaries--they used to be called, derisively, "sandalistas"--... (Col. 2--ed.) It is to be hoped, though, that her experience will deter other would-be "revolutionary tourists" from following a similar path. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- DOG From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, pg. 62, col. 2: Though one of the three undercovers who wound up confronting Dorismond called him a "dog" and began barking at him, (DA Robert--ed.) Morgenthau's letter dismissed these provocative acts as an attempt to turn "the situation into a joke," claiming that "dog" is "street slang for 'guy' or 'man.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- MORNING AFTER PILL (EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION) I don't know what the OED has on this "M." From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, pg. 30, col. 2: On August 14, Planned Parenthood of New York City announced extended hours on Mondays at its Manhattan center on Bleeker Street to increase the availability of emergency contraception (EC), commonly known as "the morning after pill." (Not related to "The Morning After," the Academy Award-winning song from that great Shelly Winters movie classic, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE--ed.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------- INDONESIAN FOOD From the VILLAGE VOICE, 5 September 2000, "Counter Culture" by Robert Sietsema, pg. 18, col. 1: _Ketchup Versus Ketjap_ ...Indonesian food remains rare in New York. (...) Sweet-corn fritters that reflect the Dutch colonization of the 13,000-island archipelago, perkedel ($4) are laced with onions and garlic and offered with ketjap, an ebony sweet-and-salty dipping sauce. Most of the appetizers are similarly fried, including lumpia (crisp vegetable spring rolls), martabak (OED?--ed.)(filo pies layered with ground meat and eggs), and risoles (supple crepes filled with carrot, cabbage, and chicken). But the tastiest of all is empek empek ($6), a Sumatran (Col. 2--ed.) curiosity assembling noodles, cucumbers, and egg-yolk-stuffed sago dumplings in a cold broth laced with vinegar and star anise. There's a real thrill to the gooey texture of the dumplings, and no soup is more refreshing on a sweltering day. Of course, the most famous Indonesian finger food is the satay. (...) Instead, order the spectacular rendang padang ($9), a dish from the Sumatran city of Padang featuring hunks of beef that cavort in a dark sauce teeming with the kinds of sweet spices--cloves, coriander, cinnamon, and mace--that made Columbus search in vain for the Spice Islands. (...) The most familiar is nasi goreng ($7.50), a miniature rijsttafel of fried rice, chicken satays, and a clean-tasting pickle of cucumber and carrot called acar. Another popular choice is bakso, Chinese soups of the sort that are adapted to local tastes throughout Southeast Asia. Mi pangsit ($5.50) is a tour de force of savory broth mobbed with egg noodles, fried wontons, and a delightful saute of ground chicken and mushrooms. (...) BOROBUDUR, 128 East 4th Street, 212-614-9079. From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 15:38:16 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:38:16 EDT Subject: Juice Jacking Message-ID: The WALL STREET JOURNAL, 30 August 2000, pg. 1 (middle column) and pg. A16, col. 1, had a story on "The High Risks of Juice-Jacking." That is, people ("juice jackers") who steal "juice," or electrical power. When I typed "juice jacking" into Google.com, I got some porno sites. See www.doitnow.org/pages/178.html, which has a short "gangsta glossary" that includes the word "juice." From robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU Thu Aug 31 15:40:50 2000 From: robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU (Robert S. Wachal) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:40:50 -0500 Subject: go = say, date? Message-ID: Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early 1930's? From jester at PANIX.COM Thu Aug 31 15:52:44 2000 From: jester at PANIX.COM (jester at PANIX.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 11:52:44 -0400 Subject: go = say, date? In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000831104050.007e0260@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> from "Robert S. Wachal" at Aug 31, 2000 10:40:50 AM Message-ID: > Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early > 1930's? It depends on how you define "say". There are pre-1930s examples of _go_ in reference to animal noises, sound effects, or inarticulate human utterances, but I'm not aware of any pre-1930s (or even pre-1940s) example where it is used meaning strictly 'to say' in reference to actual speech. Jesse Sheidlower OED From RonButters at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 16:31:26 2000 From: RonButters at AOL.COM (RonButters at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:31:26 EDT Subject: go = say, date? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/31/2000 11:48:33 AM, robert-wachal at UIOWA.EDU writes: << Does anyone have a date for 'go' in the sense of 'say' prior to the early 1930's? >> In the sense of "the cow goes 'moo' " yeah. Otherwise, I don't know of anything before the 1960s. RHHDAS has a remarklable citation from 1942--remarkable because those of us who have written in quotatitive go assumed that it arose in the 1960s and 1970s. From phille at NYTIMES.COM Thu Aug 31 16:53:40 2000 From: phille at NYTIMES.COM (Elizabeth Phillips) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 12:53:40 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- "The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more bottles of beer of whisky." Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin or history? Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Elizabeth Phillips Research Assistant "On Language" From lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Thu Aug 31 17:01:24 2000 From: lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Lynne Murphy) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:01:24 +0100 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000831115413.0092d7c0@mailgate> Message-ID: I doubt that the history of 'package store' is terribly relevant to Lieberman's use of it--he just used it because he's from Connecticut. These days it's not so much a euphemism as a regional term. Lynne >Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which >Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... > >According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the >term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- >"The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many >districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later >cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores >liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises >consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where >alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") > >The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that >year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be >sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more >bottles of beer of whisky." > >Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin >or history? > >Thanks for your help. > >Sincerely, > >Elizabeth Phillips >Research Assistant >"On Language" -- Dr M Lynne Murphy Lecturer in Linguistics School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK phone +44-(0)1273-678844 fax +44-(0)1273-671320 From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:15:22 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:15:22 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Don't know about the origin, but there's been a good deal of discussion of this term (none yet on ADS-L) ever since Lieberman (sp?) said, last week, that his father's store was a "package store." Other written and oral sources have called it the store in question a "liquor store," so there has been some debate as to whether these terms are identical or distinct. Just in the last week, I've heard brief discussions of the two terms from friends as well as on TV and radio. I heard someone who lives in Connecticut claim that the term those in the know employ is "packy," as in "I'm going down t'the packy for some beer." Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 17:32:34 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:32:34 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). I am from the Midwest, but have lived in New England for about 18 years now. As far as I know, "package store" is the regular term in New England for what a Midwesterner would call a "liquor store", or a "state store" in those states where liquor is only sold by state-run outlets (was true in Ohio when I left, and in Pa.). I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. When I visited North Carolina I noticed that they have "ABCs" (so called), which are "state stores" run by the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. I expect other states show variation in usage for these stores, as Prohibition, when repealed, allowed states to set their own rules, and some were more conservative in regulating than others. Frank Abate From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 17:34:15 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:34:15 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: In New England, "packy" is the slang-shorthand for "package store". This is definitely regionally restricted. Frank Abate From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 18:01:14 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:01:14 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Frank Abate wrote: > I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M > said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a > regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal term in Mississippi also. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:52:30 2000 From: zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU (Arnold Zwicky) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 10:52:30 -0700 Subject: Sheidlower in NY Times/"so" Message-ID: a long time ago (i've been occupied with other things for a while), mai kuha asked a question i was about to ask: So far, it seems to me that the new SO occurs only after an auxiliary. Any counter-evidence, anyone? a certain amount of gen-X informant work (easy to do if you have a lot of students around) and random collection of data suggest to me that the new SO has been extending itself from what i guess to be its original locale (see below), so that there are now a number of coexisting syntactic systems. my guess is that the new SO began as a reanalysis of the degree modifier SO - with things like 'i am SO tired of that' analyzed as having, not a predicative AdjP 'SO tired of that', with SO modifying 'tired', but rather a VP (or S) modifier, located between auxiliary BE and the predicative AdjP 'tired of that' (adverbs in -ly are sometimes ambiguous between the two scopes: 'i am truly tired' can be either 'truly, i am tired' or 'truly tired is what i am'). that should mean that the earliest examples ought to involve auxiliary BE in combination with a predicative AdjP. from there, there are several routes of extension: to other types of predicative complements with BE (in particular PP: 'i am SO in love with him'; i'm not sure about predicative NPs, as in 'she is SO (the) leader of the pack'); and to constructions with VP, rather than AdjP, complements, whether to BE - progressive BE ('i am SO trying to get over my disappointment') or passive BE ('the wall was SO eaten up by termites') - or to other auxiliaries, in particular perfective HAVE ('i have SO gotten over my disappointment') and modals ('i could SO use a cup of coffee'). all these [invented] examples have gen-X SO in between an auxiliary and its complement phrase. as a result, they are subject to (at least) two analyses: one in which the adverb is located after the first auxiliary, and one in which it's located at the beginning of the complement phrase to that auxiliary (but interpreted as modifying a phrase rather than a single word). this ambiguity is present for the adverb NOT, as in 'i will not do that' and 'i am not unhappy', which can be either an S modifier (outside the complement phrase) or a VP modifier (within the complement phrase). the first of these analyses allows SO to occur in examples where the complement phrase is not minimal; it can begin with another auxiliary ('i have SO been wanting to try sushi') or with an internal adverb, including NOT ('i am SO not tired', 'i am SO not in love with him'). this is another route of extension from the BE + AdjP examples. finally, most adverbs that can occur in the "aux1" position (after the first auxiliary, outside its complement phrase) can also occur preceding the maximal VP: ' i often am tired' alongside 'i am often tired'. (NOT is a famous exception to this generalization.) this fact provides the basis for still another extension for gen-X SO, to the position between the subject and its VP: 'i SO am not going to put up with this nonsense', 'i SO won't put up with this nonsense' etc. what i don't have any handle on is the details of the systems that individual speakers have; there are a lot of variables here. certainly, for each dimension i've mentioned, there are speakers who have made some of the extensions along that dimension. but there's a lot more to be said, beyond noting that examples like each of the following have been attested: 'i have SO finished that report", 'i am SO in love with him', 'i am SO not willing to do that', 'i SO am ready to hear the results'. (there's also plenty to say about the pragmatics, too.) arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu) From dumasb at UTK.EDU Thu Aug 31 17:58:02 2000 From: dumasb at UTK.EDU (Bethany K. Dumas) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:58:02 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <001401c01371$75704ca0$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: "Package store" was the only term I knew for a liquor store in se TX (40s, 50s, then I left). Bethany From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 06:11:21 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:11:21 +0800 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <001401c01371$75704ca0$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: At 1:32 PM -0400 8/31/00, Frank Abate wrote: >You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). This would take us through at least the mid-term election of the Gore-Lieberman administration, if any. The last DARE volume ends at O. > >I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M >said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a >regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. > Right, and if I'm not mistaken we had a discussion of "packy" or "packie" a couple of years ago, with Lynne one of the contributors. Ah, here it is (some of it, anyway); it was back in '96--so twentieth century. --Larry ================= Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 06:55:56 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: "M. Lynne Murphy" <104LYN at MUSE.ARTS.WITS.AC.ZA> Subject: Re: packy? To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L > Late that next afternoon, I found Det. Lt. Royce Whitlock of the state police > where he usually went for lunch on his days off: downstairs in the basement > of a thriving cement-block mini-mall in Lynnfield--convenience store selling > milk, cigarettes, potato chips, and lottery scratch cards and keno tickets > that kept a bunch of older guys in satin jackets rapt in front of a TV > screen; two-chair barber shop; sewing supplies store; packy; and a take-out > sandwich shop. > --George V. Higgins, Sandra Nichols Found Dead. New York: Henry Holt,1996 a packy, in most of massachusetts (that i know of), is a liquor store. more formally, a 'package store'. (this has something to do w/ liquor selling laws in massachusetts, but i don't know what.) don't know if it's spread to other parts of new england. _packy_ was definitely the most dominant term for liquor store in western mass when i lived there in the early-mid 80s. (i spent most of my time there in a umass dorm, so the packy was a frequent topic of conversation.) a "packy run" is a trip to the liquor store (to stock up). cheers, lynne ================= Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 08:41:37 EDT Reply-To: American Dialect Society Sender: American Dialect Society From: Larry Horn Organization: Yale University Subject: Re: packy? To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L To support Alice [Faber?]'s intuition, I can confirm that 'package store' is standard here but 'packy' inextant. Of course, it's hard to know that a form REALLY doesn't occur, but I've never encountered it in 15 years in the same South-Central Connecticut regional area as Alice's. I also don't remember 'packy' from a couple of years spent in Mass. in the '70's, but I do recall that 'package store' is somehow MORE standard there than here, although here it's used interchangeably with liquor store. People I know always opt for the latter unregional variant. Of course not all liquor stores are package stores: Warehouse Liquors, Liquor Land, etc.--the ones that are more like supermarkets --are not package stores (much less packies). Oh, if you were wondering, we don't call them 'lickies' either. Larry ============================================================Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 09:21:52 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: "M. Lynne Murphy" <104LYN at MUSE.ARTS.WITS.AC.ZA> Subject: Re: packy? well, either "packy" is a later development, or maybe it's college slang rather than general usage. i swear, when i lived there, nobody i knew used "package store" in normal conversations. maybe we were more affectionate toward the package store (and its contents and services) than average bay staters. lynne ================= Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 23:40:47 -0400 Reply-To: American Dialect Society Sender: American Dialect Society From: ALICE FABER Subject: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L A few weeks ago, there was some discussion on the list about the term "packy" for a liquor store. As per recollections by Lynn Murphy, this seems to be a Massachusetts term, especially Western Massachusetts (which starts, as far as I can tell, at Worcester, in other words, comprising the western 3/4 of the state, but that's another thread). Based on some other folks' unfamiliarity with the term, Lynn had speculated that this might be a more "college-y" term. At that time, I had volunteered to commission my sister to investigate among her colleagues. This evening I received her report (along with a request for other instances of regional variation in preposition usage along side "wait on line" vs "wait in line", to which I could only add "sick to/at/in one's stomach"). Her colleagues, from Enfield and Windsor, CT (essentially, just south of the Mass/CT border) can't imagine calling a liquor store anything other than a "packy"; my sister, as a non-drinker, had never encountered the term before I commissioned her. These colleagues are 20-something to 30-something, not all college educated... Alice Faber ================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 09:59:47 -0700 Sender: American Dialect Society From: David Goldstein-Shirley Subject: Re: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L Although I was subscribed to this list by someone else and have been trying unsuccessfully for some time to be unsubscribed (if the listowner is reading, would you please unsubscribe me?), I do have a response regarding the term "packy" for a liquor store. Is it possible that it refers to the ownership of many liquor stores by Pakistanis? I wouldn't be surprised if it is a British slang term. David Goldstein-Shirley University of California, Irvine ================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 14:10:39 -0400 Sender: American Dialect Society From: Margaret Ronkin Subject: Re: Packy revisited To: Multiple recipients of list ADS-L I too thought of your interpretation, but I felt that it was unlikely in the context in which 'packy' was used on this list. Also, the British abbreviation of 'Pakistani' is 'paki' or 'pakki', which came into use in the skinhead era/late 60s. Tony Thorne's _Dictionary of Contemporary Slang_ (1990) gives three senses of this shortening: (1) "an offensive racial epithet"; (2) "a descriptive term for the many independent corner stores owned and run by (South Asian) immigrant families", and (3) (still awake?) "commercial or low-grade (South Asian) hashish... as opposed to premimium products from Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal, etc.". I think it's unlikely that 'paki'/'packy' in the second sense refers to "the ownership of many liquor stores by Pakistanis". Pakistani expats may be branching into the liquor business, but Pakistan is an Islamic republic (in which only "non-Muslims" and "foreigners" can legally obtain liquor) and, I think, many if not most expats would still try to uphold community values, at least in public. - Maggie Ronkin ======================= Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 22:21:00 EDT Sender: American Dialect Society From: Larry Horn Organization: Yale University Subject: Re: Packy revisited Especially unlikely in the context of the use under discussion, given the relative paucity of Pakistani-owned liquor stores in Western Massachusetts. As we seem to have determined from the earlier discussion of the range of these items, the distribution of "packy" is a subset of that of "package store", which extends through much of (southern and central?) New England. Thus there are proportionately far more "packies" along the Connecticut River valley and adjacent areas of Massachusetts than in New Haven or Boston, but as far as I know no such disparity can be observed in the distribution of Pakistanis. (Oh, and doo-wop music wasn't originated by Italians either.) Larry ======================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM Thu Aug 31 17:54:33 2000 From: Joe_Pickett at HMCO.COM (Your Name) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:54:33 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Responding to Frank Abate's observation that "package store" is a New Englandism: I grew up in Albany, NY, but I never heard this term until I went to grad school in Ann Arbor, MI. Maybe the word passed us by in the Hudson Valley. New York lets you buy beer and wine (except I think on Sunday mornings) in grocery stores/supermarkets, so the stores that carry the hard stuff require a special license and are called "liquor stores." You can also go to a "Beverage Center," where prices are cheap and volume is big, at least for beer and soda. Ann Arbor also had the "Beer Depot," which claimed to be the first drive-through beer store in the country (having no car, I almost always walked through). As I recall, a similar store in adjacent Ypsilanti made the same claim. Sort of like claiming to be the "(fruit or vegetable)-capital" of the world. There's often more than one! I never heard "packy" in Ann Arbor, so maybe that is restricted, as Frank says. Joe Pickett From AAllan at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 18:10:56 2000 From: AAllan at AOL.COM (AAllan at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:10:56 EDT Subject: "package store" Message-ID: With regard to "package store," << You should check DARE (which I don't have handy). >> this is another reason why we all should give generously to fund the Dictionary of American Regional English, so they can hasten the publication of Volume 4, P-S. - Allan Metcalf From gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM Thu Aug 31 18:21:48 2000 From: gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM (Grant Barrett) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 20:21:48 +0200 Subject: package store Message-ID: On jeudi 31 ao?t 2000, Natalie Maynor wrote: >The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal >term in Mississippi also. And in Missouri, also, within my experience. -- Grant Barrett gbarrett at monickels.com http://www.monickels.com/ 30 rue de Beaubourg 75003 Paris, FRANCE +33 1 42 72 77 62 Mobile +33 6 17 92 31 84 Fax, Voicemail US: Toll-free 1-888-392-4832, ext. 291-340-4218 From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 18:14:09 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:14:09 -0400 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: At 01:01 PM 8/31/2000 -0500, you wrote: >Frank Abate wrote: > >> I would call "package store" a pure regionalism, and reflective (as Lynne M >> said) of Lieberman's CT origin. He may not have realized he was using a >> regionalism, as it is the natural and expected term in his dialect area. > >The region is apparently pretty large since "package store" is a normal >term in Mississippi also. > --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) > Exactly. Perhaps part of the problem is that once a term begins to be employed, even quite ephemerally, in political environments, it immediately becomes difficult for people to untangle actual usage from, on the other hand, assertions about usage that may be felt to conduce to or damage a favored political aim. When two different terms exist in the same area for the same thing (both "package store" and "liquor store" are quite famililar in NY and CT), users often tend to create a distinction between the terms even where none originally existed. I.e., users sometimes tend to assume that where two terms exist there *must* be some distinction -- which they then proceed to construct if it didn't in fact exist already. Just in the last week I have heard people from the northeast (including CT) argue that the two terms refer to two different things -- though I certainly don't know what the putative distinction would be. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 31 18:45:05 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or "state store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. Jessie Emerson From fabate at BLR.COM Thu Aug 31 18:45:45 2000 From: fabate at BLR.COM (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:45:45 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: I clearly didn't realize that this was as widely used as it seems to be. Maybe this thread will help in mapping the usage. I can say that, in my experience, its use is not universal. Could others comment as to whether it IS in use in their area? I have never heard "packy" outside of Mass. Do others outside New England know of its use elsewhere? Could someone at DARE check what is on file? The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. Frank Abate -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From highbob at MINDSPRING.COM Thu Aug 31 18:57:59 2000 From: highbob at MINDSPRING.COM (Bob Haas) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:57:59 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <011d01c0137b$94831e60$a0eaa6ce@sirsi.com> Message-ID: That's certainly the case in North Carolina. And not all towns have either one. When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was dry save for the town of Blowing Rock, which was a summer resort and/or home for many well-to-do folks from colder climes. The only ABC store in the county was in Blowing Rock, as were the only "fully stocked" package stores, as well as the county's only bars. That changed in 1986 when Boone voted in alcohol, which meant that package stores could sell beer and wine, as could grocery stores and supermarkets, as could restaurants so long as 51 percent of their revenue came from sales other than alcohol, and the local ABC store would be the only place in town where one could buy liquor. To buy a "liquor drink," as my friends and I only half-mockingly refer to them, one has to travel to a restaurant in Blowing Rock. It's a little complicated, but if you were raised Southern Baptist, or one of the various denominations of Bible Belt Christianity in the region, you understand it. You may not like it, but you understand it. I've never looked into it, but I assume that there are still plenty of dry townships throughout the state. > From: Jessie Emerson > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: "package store" > > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or "state > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. > > Jessie Emerson From jessie at SIRSI.COM Thu Aug 31 19:37:07 2000 From: jessie at SIRSI.COM (Jessie Emerson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:37:07 -0500 Subject: dry counties (was "package store") Message-ID: Dry counties certainly do still exist, and bootlegging is still a lucrative business in dry areas. My home county in Alabama, Winston County, recently was in the national news because of an election fraud scandal. The fraud included payoffs by bootleggers to officials. Jessie Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Haas" >When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was dry...[snip] From gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU Thu Aug 31 19:42:59 2000 From: gd2 at IS2.NYU.EDU (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 15:42:59 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: At 02:45 PM 8/31/2000 -0400, Frank Abate wrote: >I clearly didn't realize that this was as widely used as it seems to be. Maybe >this thread will help in mapping the usage. I was an undergrad in Ann Arbor (mentioned earlier on this thread) at the end of the 1970's; both terms (p.s./l.s.) were used there at that time, if I recall correctly. However, there were lots of non-locals in Ann Arbor -- but that's hardly unique in the U.S. at this late, highly mobile date, which is of course one of the factors we have to bear in mind in making statements about regional usage in the year 2000. >The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is >unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. > I didn't pay particularly close attention to the politicized p.s./l.s. debates, since they tended to run along predictably partisan lines. But the impression I took away is that some anti-Lieberman folks seemed to be taking the position that in saying "p.s." L. was deceptively employing a euphemism for something that some people apparently disapprove of, on moral and/or religious and/or economic grounds. Others argued that there was nothing wrong with either p.s.'es or l.s.'s, though there was some disagreement as to whether these were two different things or two different terms for the same thing. Please note that I am reporting all this sentiment, to the best of my rather general recollection, and not endorsing any of it. Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM Thu Aug 31 20:41:15 2000 From: jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM (James Smith) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:41:15 -0700 Subject: package store Message-ID: I've lived in Utah and Wyoming, both control states, and to boot I'm a non-drinker. But I have frequently heard the term "package store" and knew that Lieberman was referring to a liquor store. ===== James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively |or slowly and cautiously. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ From abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Aug 31 20:37:23 2000 From: abatefr at EARTHLINK.NET (Frank Abate) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:37:23 -0400 Subject: package store Message-ID: Frank A said: >The fact that Lieberman's usage was questioned suggests to me that term is >unfamiliar to some, and likely is restricted in some manner. > to which Greg D replied: >> I didn't pay particularly close attention to the politicized p.s./l.s. debates, since they tended to run along predictably partisan lines. But the impression I took away is that some anti-Lieberman folks seemed to be taking the position that in saying "p.s." L. was deceptively employing a euphemism for something that some people apparently disapprove of, on moral and/or religious and/or economic grounds. Others argued that there was nothing wrong with either p.s.'es or l.s.'s, though there was some disagreement as to whether these were two different things or two different terms for the same thing. Please note that I am reporting all this sentiment, to the best of my rather general recollection, and not endorsing any of it. << My guess is that those who called L's use of "package store" into question, or suggested it is a euphemism, were unaware of this term as just a straight-up equivalent for "liquor store", at least in CT. btw, in CT the package stores sell all manner of alcoholic beverages. Other stores, like grocery stores, can sell only beer. And nobody can sell ANY booze in "packages" after 8:00 p.m., or on Sunday. You gotta buy early for those parties and Sunday events, unless you go to a bar or restaurant, where you can buy individual drinks only -- no carry-out. When I was in Ohio (18 years ago), you could buy beer and wine at grocery stores, but liquor was only available in bottles from a "state store". However, you could buy carry-out beer from a bar up until 2:00 a.m., closing time. I expect that the variations on this "where and when you can buy what" theme are virtually endless, given the 50 states, dry counties, etc. Ain't Puritanism grand. Frank Abate From flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:18:20 2000 From: flanigan at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:18:20 -0400 Subject: package store In-Reply-To: <006d01c0138b$44e1bb40$e301a8c0@fabate> Message-ID: At 04:37 PM 8/31/00 -0400, you wrote: >Frank Abate said: > >When I was in Ohio (18 years ago), you could buy beer and wine at grocery >stores, but liquor was only available in bottles from a "state store". >However, you could buy carry-out beer from a bar up until 2:00 a.m., closing >time. > >I expect that the variations on this "where and when you can buy what" theme >are virtually endless, given the 50 states, dry counties, etc. Ohio has now closed down all its "state stores" (earning revenue for the state) in favor of licensed liquor stores. I've heard "package store" but am not sure how widespread it is. In Minnesota "liquor store" is the usual term (as I recall from years ago). Closing time in Ohio is still 2 a.m., except when the time changes, when all hell breaks loose. . . . _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From douglas at NB.NET Thu Aug 31 21:36:21 2000 From: douglas at NB.NET (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:36:21 -0400 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I did a little browsing at the library. I looked at Larry Horn's book but I didn't have time to read it completely. I consulted numerous reference books regarding 'fouter'/'hooter'/'hoot'. Nobody seems to see a connection between 'fouter' and 'hooter'. The consensus for 'hooter' is 'origin unknown'. 'Hoot' is regarded as a later form, possibly from 'hooter'. (I'd put that 'very probably' myself!) I didn't find any citations older than those from the OED. Two modern references (Partridge and Lighter) quote (without 'accepting') an 1859 source (Bartlett) to the effect that 'hooter' is a probable corruption of 'iota'. I guess one has to give some weight to this conjecture since it was presented closer to the origin of the word. 'Iota' fits well semantically, better than 'fouter' I think. Phonetically, I find it considerably less plausible than 'fouter', although perhaps not impossible. I suppose there could have been conflation too. 'Poot' = 'fart'' would be a plausible connection for 'hoot', but less so in the context of the earlier 'hooter', IMHO -- Doug From maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:41:35 2000 From: maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:41:35 -0500 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: Jessie Emerson wrote: > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South carries > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that sells > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. That is definitely not the case in Mississippi. A package store here is where you go to buy hard liquor or wine. > You go to a "liquor store" or "state > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. "State stores" and "ABC stores" don't exist in Mississippi. The term "liquor store" is sometimes used, though. In fact, it may be gradually taking over as a more common term than "package store." "Package store" was the only term I remember hearing back in the early days of legal liquor in Mississippi, but now I hear "liquor store" pretty often. --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From krahnke at LAMAR.COLOSTATE.EDU Thu Aug 31 21:52:25 2000 From: krahnke at LAMAR.COLOSTATE.EDU (Karl J. Krahnke) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 15:52:25 -0600 Subject: "package store" Message-ID: A possible age dimension (that says nothing about its origin): I just asked my 35 student undergraduate class how many of them knew the term. To my surprise, *none* did. We are in Colorado, but the students represent quite a variety of backgrounds. They are almost all under 24 years old. Karl Krahnke Elizabeth Phillips wrote: > Mr. Safire is interested in the origin of the term "package store," which > Sen. Lieberman used in his speech at the DNC.... > > According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977), the > term was widely used after Prohibition as a euphemism for "liquor store" -- > "The expressions 'barroom' and 'liquor store' were ... taboo in many > districts. So the euphemism 'package goods store' became widely used--later > cut down to simple 'package store.'The meaning is simple: in such stores > liquor is sold only in sealed containers (packages) for off-premises > consumption." (Similar to Webster's 3rd. ed.: "a retail store where > alcoholic beverages are sold by the bottle for drinking off the premises.") > > The OED cites an 1890 court decision reported in the Daily News of that > year: "Judge Forster [of Kansas] recently decided that liquor could only be > sold in 'original packages', which is construed as meaning one or more > bottles of beer of whisky." > > Would any of you happen to have additional knowledge of the term's origin > or history? > > Thanks for your help. > > Sincerely, > > Elizabeth Phillips > Research Assistant > "On Language" From Bapopik at AOL.COM Thu Aug 31 22:09:50 2000 From: Bapopik at AOL.COM (Bapopik at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:09:50 EDT Subject: Package Store Journal Message-ID: The NYPL has PACKAGE STORE JOURNAL. Volume 1 is from 1939; the publication was based in New York City. The card reads: "New York's only liquor and wine publication devoted to licensed retail liquor stores." Sept. 1942, united with "Bar & Grill Journal" and "Official price list...; published as the Blue Book--a guide for liquor, wine and beer merchandising in the New York city market" to form Beverage media. (See that entry.) As you all may know, I recently read through BAR & GRILL JOURNAL. However, I did not have time to request PACKAGE STORE JOURNAL. That's at the library annex! I couldn't read it today, and I work tomorrow, and the library is closed Saturday and Sunday and Monday (all for the Monday Labor Day holiday)! I might get to it on Tuesday. In any case, the term was clearly used in New York City. From natalie at MAYNOR.NET Thu Aug 31 22:03:29 2000 From: natalie at MAYNOR.NET (Natalie Maynor) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:03:29 -0500 Subject: Package Store Research Message-ID: I just looked in the yellow pages of the phone book that serves Starkville, Columbus, West Point, and Macon, Mississippi, and found that "package store" said "see liquor store." But notice the names of the stores listed under "liquor stores": A Package Store, Bulldog Package Store & Wine Collection, Cabana Package Store Inc., Caledonia Package Store, Corky's Package Store, 82 Package Store, Faye's Package Store, 15th Street Package Store, 45 Package Store, Frank's Package Store, Hill's Package Store, Johnson Package Store, Jones Liquor and Wine Gallery, The Jug Package Store, Mike's Liquor & Wine, Minnie's Package Store, Northside Package Store, Olde Tyme Wine & Liquor Inc, Sam's Package Store, The Shoppe, Snuffy's Liquor Barrell. -- -- Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu) From laurence.horn at YALE.EDU Thu Aug 31 10:24:12 2000 From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU (Laurence Horn) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 18:24:12 +0800 Subject: fout(re) > hoot(er): the RHHDAS story In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Besides, "hoot" is well-known as an alternative for "poot" (fart) and not >to give one of those is equally well-known. I'm for "hoot" = "fart" (while >we are in the area of speculation). > >dInIs > Curiously, perhaps, the RHHDAS doesn't list this equivalence under HOOT. It traces our minimizer ('hoot' glossed as 'the least bit, a whit, a damn) to 'hooter', following the OED here, while pointing out the existence of 'a hoot in hell' (which doesn't seem to sustain the 'foutre' connection particularly well, although there's no doubt some alliterative reinforcement here). As for 'hooter', it officially is [orig.unkn.], but the RHHDAS does contain a reference to a Bartlett's of 1859 that takes it to be 'probably a corruption of IOTA', which is of course the alternate form of the minimizer JOT I brought up earlier. No mention of 'foutre' here. (Other HOOTERs, for noses, breasts, telephones, and joints, all fall under hooter-2, as does dInIs's well-known sense of HOOT above: the sixth sense (hey, good name for a movie) in the hooter-2 entry is 'a breaking of wind', with a relation to Australian slang HOOT 'to stink' and a citation from a willing and eager U. of Tennessee volunteer: 'Man, it stinks in here.' 'Did you pop off a hooter?' larry From rcpullman5 at HOTMAIL.COM Thu Aug 31 23:26:07 2000 From: rcpullman5 at HOTMAIL.COM (Rita Pullman) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 23:26:07 GMT Subject: "package store" Message-ID: When I was growing up outside Winston-Salem, NC in the 1960's, you could only buy liquor in W-S at the state-run ABC store. However, if you knew where to look, there were local "shot houses" where you could buy liquor by the drink - all us Southern Baptists knew where they were, but pretended they didn't exist, because we certainly knew no one who frequented those establishments. (Joke: What is the difference between Methodists and Baptists? Methodists will speak to you in the liquor store.) In NC, there are still several dry counties (McDowell and Yadkin come to mind). I live in Asheboro, pop. 20,000, the largest dry NC city - no alcohol sold at all, not even off-premises. However, we are in Randolph County, which allows each municipality to vote whether to have beer/wine sales. Asheboro has historically voted no in the alcohol referenda, but Randleman (5 miles away) has off-premises sales and a proliferation of "package stores" which sell only beer and wine. I don't believe liquor sales are permitted. Teenagers in Asheboro speak of having to "make a trip to R" in order to obtain libations for parties. I am sure Asheboro will eventually succumb to "progress," but I rather like its current reputation as a cultural backwater on the edge of more "progressive" cities such as Greensboro. R. Pullman >From: Bob Haas >Reply-To: American Dialect Society >To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU >Subject: Re: "package store" >Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 14:57:59 -0400 > >That's certainly the case in North Carolina. And not all towns have either >one. When I was growing up in Boone, NC, the entire county (Watauga) was >dry save for the town of Blowing Rock, which was a summer resort and/or >home >for many well-to-do folks from colder climes. The only ABC store in the >county was in Blowing Rock, as were the only "fully stocked" package >stores, >as well as the county's only bars. > >That changed in 1986 when Boone voted in alcohol, which meant that package >stores could sell beer and wine, as could grocery stores and supermarkets, >as could restaurants so long as 51 percent of their revenue came from sales >other than alcohol, and the local ABC store would be the only place in town >where one could buy liquor. To buy a "liquor drink," as my friends and I >only half-mockingly refer to them, one has to travel to a restaurant in >Blowing Rock. It's a little complicated, but if you were raised Southern >Baptist, or one of the various denominations of Bible Belt Christianity in >the region, you understand it. You may not like it, but you understand it. >I've never looked into it, but I assume that there are still plenty of dry >townships throughout the state. > > > From: Jessie Emerson > > Reply-To: American Dialect Society > > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:45:05 -0500 > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > > Subject: Re: "package store" > > > > I could be wrong, but I believe that "package store" in the South >carries > > with it the connotation of an establishment (like a gas station) that >sells > > beer and maybe wine, but not liquor. You go to a "liquor store" or >"state > > store" or "ABC store" to buy hard liquor. > > > > Jessie Emerson _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. From stevek at SHORE.NET Thu Aug 31 23:27:10 2000 From: stevek at SHORE.NET (Steve K.) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 19:27:10 -0400 Subject: "package store" In-Reply-To: <39AED399.D1B31D20@lamar.colostate.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Karl J. Krahnke wrote: > I just asked my 35 student undergraduate class how many of them knew the term. > To my surprise, *none* did. We are in Colorado, but the students represent > quite a variety of backgrounds. They are almost all under 24 years old. Despite my being from Michigan, established here as a place where there are package stores, I never knew of the term 'til I started doing lexicography. They were always liquor stores to me. (I'm 33.) Usually in college though, people just talked about going to make a beer run rather than saying one was going to a liquor store or to the grocery store to get liquor. --- Steve K.