accusative cursing

[Jonathan Lighter]

It sounds slightly awkward to a well-read chap like myself but hardly unusual.  I recall thirteen-year-old troublemakers around 1960 saying such things as, "I heard X cursing your mother. And he said you were a retard."

  "Cursing your mother" generally meant calling _you_ an M.F. or an S.O.B. Involving your mother  meant theoretically you should fight the offender, but I never heard of this happening. A few gross insults would be traded in a spirit of "gotcha."

  To "curse out" (more often "cuss out") is the usual form though.

  JL

  Michael H Covarrubias <mcovarru at PURDUE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Michael H Covarrubias
Subject: accusative cursing
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A recent AP story reports that a Northwest airlines flight was canceled because
of a pilot's temper tantrum. In the story we read: "Authorities were told that
the pilot cursed one passenger who confronted him, Gregor said."

Inanimate objects are cursed all the time, but with a human object I would
expect to find "cursed at" or some other syntactical indication of a dative form.

This transitive use of 'cursed' sounds like a case of nefarious magic to me. How
common is this form?

Michael

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English Language & Linguistics
Purdue University
mcovarru at purdue.edu

web.ics.purdue.edu/~mcovarru


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