"Laid" PPP > "laid" N

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:22 AM -0500 2/10/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Heard in passing on the tube, something like:
>
>"My wife is really going to be pissed, when she finds out about _all
>the laid_ that I've been getting!"
>
>This was spoken by an actor, of course. So, who knows whether it was
>ad-libbed in situ or composed at keyboardu by some writer? But, even
>if it's the latter case, it's still an interesting example of ...
>what? Of a "syntacto-semantic" pun used as a pswaydo-euphemism? Name
>it and claim it.
>
>-Wilson

Wow.  That is something.  For some reason, it reminds me of something
the now late Updike once wrote in his 1968 novel _Couples_.  The
individuals involved here are a suburban couple expecting a baby; the
pregnant wife is supposed to refrain from sex during whichever
trimester she's in, but of course--given the novel's author and
era--is doing so only with her husband.

"He kissed her shoulder in token of the love they should not in that
month make (...and turned over to sleep)."

(I may have the line slightly off, but the relative clause on the
idiom chunk ("[make] love") is not that dissimilar to the one Wilson
overheard ("[get] laid") minus the category shift but plus a semantic
one.)

LH

>---
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org