"migrate", v.tr., a sort-of untracked sense

[Dan Goncharoff]

By divesting the account, the bank also divested itself of its client, you,
especially in the context of explaining to you how the sale of your account
affects you. I would find their recognition of your humanity surprising,
but appropriate.

As for data, I learned financial accounting in the days of paper and pencil
and adding machines, but experience keeps reinforcing the idea that there
is nothing new under the sun. Data was data back then, too. An account name
and number are data, whether written on the top of the page or maintained
as the header record of a data file.

DanG


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "migrate", v.tr., a sort-of untracked sense
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On May 11, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>
> > To me an account is a form of data, and has been so since the development
> > of ledger books.
>
> OK; I guess I don't tend to think of an e-mail account as data, although I
> think of the messages it makes available to me as data.  My imagination is
> limited, I'm willing to concede.
> >
> > As for divestee, your account was divested, ie, sold, by your original
> > bank, the divester. By my thinking, your account was a divestee.
>
> That would make sense to me, except for the general constraint on -ee
> nominals that restricts them to animates and indeed humans.  This
> constraint is sometimes overridden, but it's fairly robust.  But in any
> case I myself, and not my account, was described as a divestee.
>
> LH
> >
> >
> > On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu
> >wrote:
> >
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> >> Subject:      "migrate", v.tr., a sort-of untracked sense
> >>
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> I just received a notice that my e-mail account is about to be deleted,
> =
> >> and while I first took this to be one of the many many spam warnings I =
> >> regularly receive along these lines, I realized this was an actual one,
> =
> >> but no need to panic, because my account, as they reminded me, "has
> been =
> >> migrated" to a different sort of account as part of a mass migration =
> >> event of this kind that we're undergoing.  I checked the OED entry for =
> >> transitive "migrate", underlying such a plural, and the closest was=20
> >>
> >> 7. Computing.
> >> a. trans. To transfer (data, programs, etc.) from one environment to =
> >> another.
> >>
> >> Neither the definition nor the cites include the possibility of an =
> >> account being migrated, although it might be taken to fall under this =
> >> definition.  Becoming a migrant in this way reminded me of an event =
> >> several years ago when a bank merger (Fleet, formerly BankBoston, being
> =
> >> swallowed up by Bank of America) resulted in a randomly selected subset
> =
> >> of account holders being notified that our accounts were being =
> >> "divested" and would be transferred to another, unrelated bank.  =
> >> (Apparently B of A couldn't take in all of the suddenly unbanked =
> >> multitudes because this would have violated one of the few
> anti-monopoly =
> >> laws affecting the banking industry.)  We received notices in which we =
> >> were referred to as "divestees", a word for which there is no entry in =
> >> the OED and which doesn't follow by principles of semi-productive =
> >> morphology from any of the listed meanings of transitive "divest"--e.g.
> >> 5.  Econ. To sell off (a subsidiary company); to dispose of, cease to =
> >> hold (an investment).
> >>
> >> --which would seem to predict that the bank rather than the individual =
> >> account holder would be the divestee in this case.=20
> >>
> >> LH =20=
> >>
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