"Does anybody remember laughter?"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:23 AM -0500 11/10/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>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

Yes, how times have changed.  What would Quang Phuc Dong (and his
colleagues at the South Hanoi Institute of Technology) say if he were
with us today?

Larry

(If anyone is doing research on this, there are a couple of follow-up
papers from a few years later that now strike one as almost equally
quaint:

Baker, Robert.  "Pricks" and "chicks": a plea for "persons".
Moulton, Janice.  "Sex and reference".

Both reprinted in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, ed. _Sexist Language: A
Modern Philosophical Analysis_.  Littlefield & Adams, 1981.)