heart-warmed

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Sat Mar 4 19:31:27 UTC 2006


Here's a back-formation that the major dictionaries haven't picked up yet...

* heart(-)warmed,  ppl. a. 'touched by something heart-warming'

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http://blogs.newsobserver.com/readers/index.php?title=animal_rights
We've been deluged with phone calls from readers less than
heart-warmed by the front-page photo of a Santa-garbed woman and an
orangutan sharing what looks for all the world like a French kiss.
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http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2005-01-13/news_feature.php
Western response to the tsunami catastrophe ... has left me both
heart-warmed and mind-saddened.
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http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/men/postbag/template/2005/11/18.html?5
As a former classmate of the lovely Joanne Whalley, I am heartwarmed
by her story.
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http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38761
"I watched it with my grandmother," Lund said. "Neither of us were
heartwarmed at all, which I thought was unusual."
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http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Australias-leading-man/2005/04/24/1114281448544.html
Patriots will be heartwarmed that an Aussie (though born in Nigeria)
is our biggest drawcard.
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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6970536/
She plays Opal like a hopped-up 21st Century Pollyanna, applying glib
"glad girl" solutions to the problems of the local curmudgeons -- all
of whom seem more than willing to be heartwarmed.
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Looks like it's nothing new:

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http://books.google.com/books?id=rxAGeugHX34C
Nathan Lanesford Foster, _The Last of His Family_ (1850)
O, emulate her virtues : hold most dear / Her heart-warmed counsels and her
stainless life.
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http://books.google.com/books?id=IrVXq8rhu_4C
Frances Power Cobbe, _Life of Frances Power Cobbe_ (1894)
It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory to find the ideas
which I had hammered out ... supported by apparently adequate
erudition and heart~warmed by fervent piety.
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And I have no idea if this Twain quote is apocryphal or not...

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http://www.itre.org/Quotes.htm
It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and
aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the
admired, the  despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the
savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth),
may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest
and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
Mark Twain's Christmas greetings, 1890
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--Ben Zimmer

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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