"the Big [initial]"

[Laurence Horn]

On Sep 2, 2011, at 12:04 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> On Sep 1, 2011, at 6:40 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 1, 2011, at 9:07 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>
>>> My take, in addition, has been that the advertisers don't want to scare the
>>> average American male with a word of many syllables; moreover, they don't
>>> want to say such a word more than once.  It's off-putting.
>>>
>>>
>>> JL
>>
>> Maybe, but like Charlie my take is that it's a standard euphemism.  In a recent paper on taboo I class "Low T" with "E.D." (along with its ancestor, VD) and "P.E." (not the gym kind) as PBIs, for Plain Brown Initialisms.
>
> a paper appearing/to appear where?
>
>
I presented it at the recent meeting, ISLE 2 [International Society for the Linguistics of English] at Boston U., and it will be appearing (when I write it up) in the (possibly electronic) proceedings of that conference.

LH

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