footnotes to recent discussions

[George Thompson]

We recently tossed about the topic of words rarely or never encountered
without a negative prefix: disgruntled, not gruntled.  The NY Times,
February 11, 2002, page A16, col. 1, quotes the Sheriff of Wahington
county, Maine, regarding drug use there: ""It's gone beyond the
epidemic stage," Sheriff Joe Tibbetts said, "I can't think of a family
in Washington County that hasn't been scathed by it in some way.""  An
old Shorter OED calls "scathed" obsolete and dialectal.  I'm familiar
with "unscathed" only.

A while ago we discussed the term "Little Italy" and the areas to which
it is applied in NYC.  Mr. Boatti, I think it was, pointed to the
Belmont section of the Bronx as a "Little Italy".  I see in a program
of up-coming events at the New-York Historical Society that there will
be a tour of "Central Harlem and the South Bronx" that "features a
walking tour of New York City's real "Little Italy," Belmont, in the
Bronx, and a stop for lunch on Arthur Avenue."  (This will be Saturday,
June 8, starting at 9 am, by the way; lead by N-YHS president Kenneth
T. Jackson.)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.