Call By

[Aaron E. Drews]

on 30/3/00 7:21 AM, Scott Swanson wrote:

> This morning, I heard a newsreader on a Canadian radio station (Calgary)
> say that census-takers would be "calling by" - which I understood from
> other context to mean that the census-takers would be visiting
> householders at their homes. Is this term common across Canada? Anywhere
> in the US? Britain? (Oh, that's right, they would say the census-takers
> would be "knocking up" the householders, much to the general delight of us
> Yanks...) Here (Montana) we would say "stopping by" or "coming by".

"Calling by" strikes me as an older British usage.  I'm sure I've heard in
in B&W films.  But I don't think it's used nowadays, at least among the
people I associate with.  I haven't heard "knocking up" except on very rare
occasion, most often in discussion dialectal differences.

Is the term "newsreader" used in the US?  I thought it was "anchor" with
"-man", "-woman" or "-person" as a suffix.  While ABC might have news
anchors, the BBC has newsreaders.  What does the CBC have?

--Aaron


--
________________________________________________________________________
Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron      Departments of English Language and
aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                    Theoretical & Applied Linguistics

 "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
  --Death