RE "Shoot beaver"?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Nov 12 01:38:20 UTC 2010


At 4:52 PM -0800 11/11/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Nov 11, 2010, at 11:18 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>  ... Even under the best of circumstances, it's unlikely
>>  that the "top cream," as we say in (some parts of?) East Texas, of the
>>  field would ever post their works-in-progress to a listserv in order
>>  to sollicit the random opinions of the field's hoi polloi, as opposed
>>  to consulting personally with friends and colleagues who are their
>>  fellow-specialists in a given niche in the broader field of
>>  elephantology, as they do now.
>
>i, for one, have fairly often done exactly that, and then given
>ADS-L and its participants credit in the result. it's gotten harder
>and harder to do, sadly.
>
While not necessarily swimming in that pool of cream (for one thing I
suspect I'm lactose intolerant), I've certainly bounced a variety of
hypotheses off the list over the years and I've done my share of
solicitation of data that were later published (or brought up in
class lectures) with appropriate credit to ADS-L on such topics as
personal datives, hypernegation (e.g. "so don't I"), retro-NOT,
uh-huh and unh-unh, positive "anymore", ethnic slurs, and
etymological excavation (in particular on "spitten image").  I
realize that my postings not infrequently indulge in topics of
parochial dialectological interest (if not downright silliness),
but...I guess that's how I roll.

LH

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