"write," n. = "something intended to be read; a writing."

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Indisrciminantly" isn't in OED at all.  Or anywhere so far as I can tell.

  And the OED cites (from 1825) seem generally to confirm my impression.  Early exx. treat it as something you "have" or "take," and OED defines this as "an act of perusal; a spell of reading" (like "a good sleep" = a spell of sleeping).  Modern usage (cited from 1958, app. in Britain), applies it to the thing read: "That's a good/bad/etc. read."

  I suggest the two nuances be separated in the next revision.


  JL

y at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: "write," n. = "something intended to be read; a writing."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sep 22, 2006, at 1:09 PM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> ... The chosen adjective makes all the difference. I remember
> "read" blossoming in the early '60s.

or you started noticing it then, maybe because you came across
several occurrences close to one another. to find out if it actually
blossomed then, and blossomed especially among reviewers, we'd have
to some fairly tedious research.

> Reviewers used it fairly indiscriminately. (Or
> "indiscriminantly" : 70,000 raw Googlits.)

i used to associate it with british usage. and that's consistent
with the trend of the OED's cites, but then that might just reflect a
british sampling bias in the dictionary.

arnold

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