On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, David Bergdahl wrote: #My mother, b. 1909 of Brooklyn-born parents, protestant, had the #dear=expensive usage, with no contact with Yiddish whatsoever. Ah! Thank you. There's a lot of Yiddish influence in NYC English, of course, but this makes a good case for purely English retention. -- Mark A. Mandel Linguist at Large