"Above approach"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:11 AM -0400 5/30/06, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>Why the half-way appreciation?  I would be pleased to have invented this.
>
>Joel

It's been independently invented a few times, it would appear.  There
are 44 raw google web hits for "is above approach" (that eliminates
irrelevantia like "on the above approach"), in contexts like

No political or religious institution is safe, no sovereign entity is
above approach

If you are AMD, Google, Apple, Mozilla then everything you do is
above approach.

His work ethic is above approach

Other things that are claimed to be above approach are the piety of
the albino monk in "The Da Vinci Code", someone's operating practice,
someone else's honor and integrity, Justice Alito's ethics, and so
on.  Seems like a pretty unintentional substitution to me, what we
used to call malaprops in our benighted prescriptive days...

LH

>
>At 5/30/2006 08:16 AM, you wrote:
>>In this morning's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there's an AP story on Sen.
>>Harry Reid, who accepted a questionable gift from the Nevada Athletic
>>Commission. Kathleen Clark, an expert on congressional ethics at
>>Washington University in St. Louis, is quoted as saying, "I think he
>>would want to be above approach even when it's from a state
>>commission and not a private lobbyist."
>>
>>If it's a deliberate coinage - above being approached? - it strikes me as
>>halfway clever, but there's a definite eggcornish flavor to it.
>>
>>Jim Parish
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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