"Does anybody remember laughter?"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I wonder how universal this distinction ever was. There must always have been speakers who were insensitive to nuances of this sort.  Certainly there were plenty in the NYC around 1960 who didn't obviously observe the distinction.

Even "bang" and "screw" have been used transitively with female subjects.

Grammatical subjects.

JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: "Does anybody remember laughter?"
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Does anybody else recall when men "laid" and only women "got laid"?
How about the article in _Studies From Left Field_ (1971) in which the
sentence, "John fucked Mary," is accepted as grammatical, whereas the
sentence, "Mary fucked John," is marked as ungrammatical?
--
-Wilson Gray



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