Up and down, railways and Oxbridge (was: Upstate/downstate)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Mar 5 20:32:46 UTC 2004


>--On Friday, March 5, 2004 10:22 am -0500 Damien Hall
><halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
>
>>UNIVERSITIES
>>
>>Rev Spooner was Dean of New College, Oxford;  I think it would probably be
>>thought of as snobbery in many, if not all, Universities other than
>>Oxbridge to use 'send down' and 'go up', and that they would just say
>>'expel' and 'go to University'.  Could someone at another British
>>University comment?  Also, interestingly, New College itself asserts that
>>Spooner 'almost certainly never uttered a Spoonerism, but equally
>>certainly had a number of curious verbal traits':
>>http://corelli.new.ox.ac.uk/college/briefhistory.html
>
>

If that's true, where did his reputation for doing so--strong enough
for him to serve as the eponym for the practice--originate, I wonder?
Did someone ELSE accuse his students of having tasted the whole worm,
or go around talking reverently about the queer old dean?

larry horn



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