bollards, bolsters, who cares?

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed May 9 03:54:02 UTC 2007


FWIW, "traffic bollards" sounds all right to me. "Traffic bolsters"
sounds laughable. Perhaps it's mere slip of the keyboard.

-Wilson

On 5/8/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      bollards, bolsters, who cares?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> NYT op-ed piece by Colum McCann, 5/8/07:
>
> My children might ask me about the complexities of SWAT teams on Wall
> Street, or why there are traffic bolsters around the synagogue on
> East 87th Street, or why...
>
> -----
>
> the only relevant google hit on "traffic bolsters".
>
> "traffic bollards", on the other hand, gets over 20k.
>
> arnold
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens
------
The tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones.

                                           Rumanian proverb

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