"Plough with the favorite heifer", 1749

[Wilson Gray]

Kanye West?! You don't say so! That nice little colored boy who was on
the Mickey Mouse Club with Britney Spears? Well, I'll be John Brown!
What is this world coming to? ;-)

I would never have thought that a nice, middle-class kid like him
would be contributing to the destruction of the classical - i.e., as
it was spoken when I was his age - Contemporary English language. ;-)
Moicy Jedus!

-Wilson

On 6/6/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Plough with the favorite heifer", 1749
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 6/6/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/6/06, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > > Incidentally, that metaphorical "plow" presents one of those
> > > verb +/- preposition cases.  Interpreted literally, the
> > > phrase "plow with a heifer" would be taken to mean 'hitch a
> > > heifer (rather than an ox) to the plow in order to plow a
> > > field'--in contrast with Shakespeare's "plowed HER."  But I
> > > suppose we can say (literally or figuratively) either "fuck
> > > (somebody)" or "fuck WITH (somebody)."
> >
> > Can "fuck with" have a literal meaning of "have sex with"? I know of
> > only metaphorical ways to use  it, e.g.:
> >
> > John fucked with Bill's head by fucking with the brother's shit.
>
> Well, you can use it with the literal meaning if you're Kanye West, as
> we learned back in December:
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0512B&L=ADS-L&P=R3671
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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