Call By

Donald M. Lance LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU
Thu Mar 30 23:37:56 UTC 2000


to call by -- perhaps directly related to the older term "calling card"?

"Aaron E. Drews" wrote:

> on 30/3/00 7:21 AM, Scott Swanson wrote:
>
> > This morning, I heard a newsreader on a Canadian radio station (Calgary)
> > say that census-takers would be "calling by" - which I understood from
> > other context to mean that the census-takers would be visiting
> > householders at their homes. Is this term common across Canada? Anywhere
> > in the US? Britain? (Oh, that's right, they would say the census-takers
> > would be "knocking up" the householders, much to the general delight of us
> > Yanks...) Here (Montana) we would say "stopping by" or "coming by".
>
> "Calling by" strikes me as an older British usage.  I'm sure I've heard in
> in B&W films.  But I don't think it's used nowadays, at least among the
> people I associate with.  I haven't heard "knocking up" except on very rare
> occasion, most often in discussion dialectal differences.
>
> Is the term "newsreader" used in the US?  I thought it was "anchor" with
> "-man", "-woman" or "-person" as a suffix.  While ABC might have news
> anchors, the BBC has newsreaders.  What does the CBC have?
>
> --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



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