Dante, the one-hit wonder

[Victor Steinbok]

There is still something unsatisfying about the "foreground v." entry,
but it's not the word itself.

Given the supposed derivative,

> Derivatives
> ?foregrounding n.  [rendering Czech /aktualisace/ modernization
> (Havránek and Weingart /Spisovná c(es(tina a jazyková kultura/
> (1932))] /spec./ in /Linguistics/ the use of unorthodox or unexpected
> devices in language.
> 1959 R. Quirk in Quirk & Smith /Teaching of English/ i. 45   The
> Prague School notion of what has been translated as
> 'foregrounding'..is defined by Mukar(ovský as 'the aesthetically
> intentional distortion of the linguistic components' in relation to
> the normal standard language on the one hand and to 'the traditional
> aesthetic canon' on the other.

I'm curious if the "foregrounded" in Levin's 1962 quote is not actually
/derived/ from the supposedly derivative "foregrounding"? In other
words, at least in this context, isn't the verb a back-formation?

For a truly derivative example, just borrow another post from Jon!

At 2/13/2011 01:59 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> Not in OED but scores of GB hits:
>
> ...
> 2000 Michelle A. Masse' in David Punter, ed. _A Companion to the Gothic_
> (Oxford: Blackwell) 240: By *foregrounding* the loss of all
> boundaries, or
> dissolution into the abhuman, Hurley addresses issues of race and
> masculinity in the Gothic that evidence themselves as 'hysterical
> nausea.'

And it's not even in the linguistic sense, but it's also not a noun. ;-)

     VS-)

On 3/7/2011 8:05 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> ...
> But there is something else in the original post by Rader (at SFGate)
> that grabbed my attention:
>
>> I foreground the U.S. only because it means both cultural capital and
>> book sales.
>
> This deserves the spot in the OED right next to the Mark Twain quote
> from 1892 and a linguistics comment from 1962:
>
>> 1892 'M. Twain' /Amer. Claimant/ xvi. 153   We could do a prodigious
>> trade [in portrait-painting] with the women if we could foreground
>> the things they like, but they don't give a damn for artillery.
>> 1962 S. R. Levin /Ling. Struct. Poetry/ ii. 17   Foregrounded
>> linguistic elements..call attention to themselves.
>
> At least, Twain used it with irony.
>
> I am not trying to be prescriptivist here and whine about verbing of
> "foreground". But I /can/ give a self-proclaimed English poetry expert
> a hard time about the style of his own prose--especially when what
> he's really trying to say is that he puts the US front and center
> because of its cultural imperialism (which is really just a large
> tumor on English cultural imperialism that prevailed until WWI).

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