Stick pins (was: pleonasms: ink pen)

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, February 15, 2002 5:07 pm +0000 Douglas Bigham
<TlhovwI at AOL.COM> wrote:

> Nothing missed.  That which you call "stick pin" I call "pin". (Oh!  Look
> at the pin I got for donating blood!)

No, what you're calling a 'pin' is not a stick pin to me.  (Unless the Red
Cross have gotten weird in their pin-giving since I've been gone, these
days it's usually a sticker, maybe a button.  I guess they used to give
those plastic blood-drops with a pin sticking out the end, but like you,
I'd just call that a 'pin'--stick pin is something different.)  'Stick pin'
for me (and perhaps the person you were replying to as well) is very
particularly the kind of jewelry pin that has a decorative bit on one end,
mounted at a right angle to a long pin that you stick through your clothing
as you would a straight pin (in and out again) with a visible 'thingie'
(usu. w/ a bit of cork or something in it) that you put on the pointy end
of the pin.    See a picture of one at:

http://www.jaedworks.com/gallery/roses/rose-stickpin.html

In searching for this picture though, I found a picture of something else
that someone else is calling a 'stick pin', which looks to me like a 'lapel
pin':

http://www.sname.org/accessory_pin.htm

However 9 of the first 10 hits I got on google for 'stick pin' were for
proper stick pins, rather than lapel pins.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320