[Ads-l] The New Yorker Comma Queen on "they", part II

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Apr 3 00:06:40 UTC 2016


On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> But not us.


Of course, she meant to write,

"But not _we_."

As John Red Corn admonished Bobby Hill (paraphrased):

"These rituals are of great importance to our people. Don't. *half-ass*.
them!"

Don't you just love it when semi-literate prescriptivists reveal their own
ignorance. "If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly," as we say in the
'hood. However, the fact of the matter is that

Youneverknow

when it comes to old saws, in which _saw_ is the regular, English reflex of
the same, proto-Germanic form that has gives us _saga_ and, of course,
_say_.

The Cosmopolitan - Volume 45 - Page 91
https://books.google.com/books?id=GDtXAAAAYAAJ
1908
An Inside Tip,
by George Hyde Preston
"Now today the word is, hammer it! We have them on the run. Order our
brokers to raid the stock. No half-measures! _If you are going to be a
bear, be a grizzly_!"
-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list