Banned Words

Dennis R. Preston preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU
Wed Jan 5 18:21:12 UTC 2000


Course not. Why would you want to "ban" any of these cool words - unless
you just like to flaunt your linguistic prejudices in public.

Frankly, I hope they don't stop publishing stuff like this. It allows those
of us who have an interest in the nonlinguistic public's reactions to and
beliefs about language to keep our finger on their pulses - like when
people say they are about to "puke" when they hear a form, word,
pronunciation, etc... . This physical reaction is often also claimed by
some on hearing various taboo forms (especially scatalogical and
blasphemous ones). Talk about "body language"!

dInIs




>> >From Lake Superior University at http://www.lssu.edu/banished/2000.html
>>
>>Following is the entirety of the 2000 Banished Words List
>
>[snip]
>
>>Verbing of Innocent Nouns:
>>
>>To Action...
>
>But verbing of nouns is a morphological process, not a "word"; how do
>you ban a productive morphological process from a language?  And
>would you want to?
>
>Ronald Kephart
>English & "Foreign" Languages
>University of North Florida


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736



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