footnotes to recent discussions

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:02 PM -0500 2/12/02, George Thompson wrote:
>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.
>
I think the Shorter OED is wrong.  A survey of both google sites and
Nexis hits turns up quite a number of positive "scathed"s, many not
even in the negative context of the quote above (which is a bit like
"we won't recover for the foreseeable future").  The Steelers
offensive line was scathed by fans and media, Tide Point in Baltimore
has been slightly scathed by the market, "We are all scathed" [about
the effect of 9/11] etc.  Granted, most hits occur in negative
contexts like the one above ("(not) unduly scathed", "without feeling
scathed", etc.), but a goodly chunk of the 308 Nexis hits and "about
3,570" Google sites have no negation in sight, reflecting both the
'scarred, burned' meaning and the 'criticized' meaning of the
football context above.  (I should note that some of these examples
involve past tenses rather than passive participles, but the vast
majority are indeed passive.)  Maybe the old Shorter OED reflects
British usage?

larry