"Monday"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Jul 31 13:19:11 UTC 2012


On Jul 31, 2012, at 8:34 AM, Amy West wrote:

> On 7/31/12 12:01 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>> Date:    Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:58:13 -0400
>> From:    "Joel S. Berson"<Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject: Re: "Monday"
>>
>> At 7/30/2012 12:19 PM, W Brewer wrote:
>>> >WB don't even know what Leominster is.
>> It's a kind of sauce for steak.  (Massachusetts never had -shires,
>> except when the pretentious English royal appointees misspoke.)
>>
>>> >It was Joel the
>>> >Pretentious who said something about Herman Munster, or something.
>> I wasn't being sitcomical, rather cheesy.
>>
>> J. the P.
> Hey, I just want to say that the Word column that Ben came up with re:
> "Monday" was really, really good: talking about secret slang, which is
> an aspect of this I hadn't even thought of. I fully recognize that slang
> has the function of creating in- and out- groups just by who uses it,
> but the use of terms to hide their meaning in another layer of
> obfuscation only intensifies that aspect of slang. But, I am, as it has
> been pointed out very often, a doofus.
>
> I'm really glad that the BG has Ben writing the Word column. I was
> really looking forward to what he would come up with once I knew he was
> following this story, and I'm quite sure that my husband rolled his eyes
> as he heard my squeals of excitement as I opened the Ideas section.
>
> http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/07/28/how-did-monday-become-racist-slur-how-did-monday-become-racist-slur/Mf4fQEVcXabGKHFaDMZ4NO/story.html
>
> ---Amy the W., from the Real Steak Sauce Place.
>
Hear hear.  We'd discussed "Canadian" before, but several of these were new to me, and I'm certainly grateful to be able to be properly offended next time someone calls me an Eskimo.

LH

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