"come face"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Try reading every single limerick in both volumes looking for slang antedatings.

  I did.

  And I'm still gnormal.

  JL



"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: "come face"
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On Oct 18, 2006, at 1:41 PM, Charlie Doyle wrote:

> So many of the Google entries for "cum face" appear merely as long
> (seemingly random) lists of "sex words"!
>
> So, I courageously betook myself go Google Images (what a man won't
> do for the advancement of knowledge!).

well, i think it actually is a sacrifice on charlie's part. this is
very dispiriting stuff.

(a long time ago i did a project that involved looking at the
metrical patterns and rhyme schemes of limericks, using Legman's big
Limericks collection as a source. almost all of them are dirty, of
course. very quickly, i (and the other coders) became discouraged by
the human condition. it was not fun at all.)

> There, it became obvious, on the face of it,

we caught that!

> that Arnold's sense of the phrase does predominate.

well, there's still a fair amount of variation.

arnold

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