[Ads-l] Fwd: a semantic question for you

Mark Mandel markamandel at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jul 17 02:02:52 UTC 2019


A question from a friend of mine:

When I was in Freiburg, the staff at the school referred to their area as a
triangle, a place where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet.
Now the word triangle is being used to refer to three contiguous Central
American countries.
But I haven’t been able to find an explicit definition for this use of the
word triangle.
Do you know of a source?
This use of the word seems to be becoming more and more common.

I found a few uses and sent them to him, but nothing like a formal
definition. I told him not to expect necessarily to find one: "This is
*usage*, man." But does anyone know of such?

Mark Mandel

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



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