skidoosh

Marc Velasco marcjvelasco at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jun 11 20:34:46 UTC 2008


Squadoosh morphing?

These rates both gave the spark and the squadoosh to the real estate craze
by allowing super-low intro rates and then steadily raising those rates.

More datapoints will tell the story.


On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: skidoosh
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 1:06 PM -0400 6/11/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Laurence Horn
> ><laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >>  At 11:46 AM -0400 6/11/08, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >>>On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Mark Peters
> >>><markpeters33 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>>>   I've wondered about squadoosh... I've only heard it on PTI too.
> >>>>  Could it be related to squat too? What a great word.
> >>>
> >>>No doubt influenced by "squat" (in usage if not origin), since it
> >>>works like other "squatitives"/"vulgar minimizers".
> >>
> >>  And crucially, like other squatitives (hey, can I claim priority for
> >>  that technical term, or does it predate 2001?  and when does it make
> >>  it into the OED?), it appears in unlicensed contexts too...
> >
> >Well, you yourself used the term on this list in 2000, but you
> >attributed it to Ross and Postal.
> >
> >http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0010B&L=ads-l&P=5513
> >
> >
> >--Ben Zimmer
>
> Ah, so I did.  Curiously, though, Postal's paper on squatitives ("The
> Structure of One Type of Vulgar English Minimizer", in his _Skeptical
> Linguistic Essays" [OUP, 2004]) never refers to them as such, but
> only as the eponymous class of "vulgar minimizers".  In that paper,
> he also cites Horn 1996, which is the earlier Dutch version of my
> 2001 paper, so I guess the first OED cite will have to be to the
> phenomenon of "squatitieve negatie".
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list