heart-rendering

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, Arnold.

  But just to be clear: my students have been using "heart-rendering" for decades, but so far as I remember only in the sense (like "heart-rending") of "painfully affecting; so tragic you can't stand it."

  Dr. Peters does a double jump: his "heart-rendering" is something positive.

  In a similar vein, a few years back I knew a student who used "tearjerker" in a positive way.
  E.g., "'Come Up from the Fields, Father,' is Whitman's famous tearjerker about the Civil War." He went on to say how affecting it was.  I suspect this is pretty common.

  Another dude, in a letter to the _Atlantic_, insisted that a "stemwinder" was a long, tedious speech, because it made the audience check their watches; then they'd fiddle with them.

  JL



"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: heart-rendering
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On Feb 15, 2008, at 7:50 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> ... This is the first time I've heard "heart-rendering" [sic] used
> as a synomnym for "moving; heart-warming."

nice anticipatory typo in "synomnym".

arnold

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