freten by sowe

[Dennis Preston]

Nope. Dragons, worms, beasts or all sorts do the fretting (often but
not always of humans). Didn't see no humans doing no fretting.

dInIs

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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>Subject:      Re: freten by sowe
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 3/2/2008 10:24 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>OED, "fret", v.1:
>>1.    a. trans. Chiefly of animals: To eat, devour. Also with up and
>>to eat of. Obs.
>>         b. transf. To devour, consume, destroy. Obs.
>
>This does not rule out fretting by humans.  And I don't read ME.  Can
>someone tell me whether some of the quotations (see links below) are
>about humans fretting?  (I surmise that some of them are about humans
>being fretten!)
>
>Joel
>
>At 3/2/2008 11:41 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>
>>There are a number of example quotations in the on-line Middle English
>>Dictionary:
>>
>  >http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.html
>>
>  >http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=byte&byte=63092228&egdisplay=open&egs=63105220
>
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--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
Morrill Hall 15-C
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48864 USA

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