they don't make words like they used to

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:46 AM -0500 9/18/06, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:
>I watched most of "Rooster Cogburn" over the weekend.  In it, John
>Wayne's character is being forcibly retired for reasons of age and
>decrepitude.  He maintains that he is good for another "lustrum",
>however.
>

Nice catch.  I tried a Nexis search and found a total of 54 hits,
most of which are irrelevant in that their use lacks any
presupposition that the reader will understand the meaning.  Many of
the "lustrum"s ("lustra"?) involve references to either an eponymous
Australian horse or an eponymous rock band, some involve vocabulary
quizzes (in which the word is mentioned rather than used), one is
from a reference to the practice of "lustration" in a Safire column
in which the word--referring to the practice of barring officials of
a now-disgraced earlier administration (Communist, Baathist,
pro-Apartheid, etc.) from positions of power in a new regime--is
related to the original Latin meaning of "lustrum" as a ritual
purification held every five years.  But one of the few relevant hits
is also one of the most topical, a reference in a TV review in the
Portland Oregonian (8/12/06) to "the lustrum of 9/11, which of course
took place a week ago today.

LH

>  >
>>  Just got this notice on Linguist List, which led me to wonder...
>>
>>  >
>>  >This lustrum workshop offers a forum of discussion between
>>  researchers
>>  >from different fields of writing research (theoretical linguistics,
>>  >psycholinguistics, computational linguistics or language education),
>>  >from different countries and working on different languages.
>>
>>  ...what exactly a lustrum workshop was.  I was pretty sure
>>  I'd never knowingly encountered a lustrum before, and had no
>>  conception of what it might be.  Anyone else know?  I may
>>  have lived a sheltered (not to say benighted) life, but I was
>>  somewhat surprised to come across this announcement with its
>>  apparent presupposition that the reader would immediately
>>  recognize that a "lustrum workshop" obviously refers to...
>>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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