TANSTAAFL (was: Today's New York Times)

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 2/1/01 2:21:53 PM Eastern Standard Time,
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:

<< In fact, the acronym must have (and as I recall it did) stood for
 "There AIN'T no such thing as a free lunch", or else it would have
 been TINSTAAFL.  What we have here is another covert-prestige dialect
 borrowing. >>

What we have here is a piece of keyboard laziness.  I cut-and-pasted "There
is no such thing as a  free lunch" from Fred Shapiro's original post without
noticing that his quotation used "is" rather than "ain't".  My mistake.

       - Jim Landau

PS. On the subject of "stroganoff", I found what is probably an incorrect
folk etymology.  It was from a book entitled either "Siberia, Cradle of
Conquerors" or "Cradle of Conquerors: Siberia" which consisted of seven
hundred pages of great yarns and equally great factual errors.  According to
this book, the Stroganoff family took its name, which means "grated", from an
ancestor who suffered the fate of being cut up into pieces for some misdeed.
Hence "beef stroganoff" iwould be "beef cut up into little pieces" rather
than "beef with sour cream."