more lost subjunctive; protest at

[Wilson Gray]

If this be a shift in usage, what can you do? And, given that it's so
hard to understand, why in hell is it becoming so popular? The person
who wrote that headline should be getting the forty lashes.

OT: Should there be anyone who doesn't already know, the lashes are
applied incrementally and not all at once. The lashee is allowed to
heal between sets of lashings. For dekkids, I'd wondered how slaves
and seamen lived through those twenty to 100 lashes that you read
about. It still seems stupid, though. The slave / seaman could be
working instead of healing.

-Wilson

On Dec 1, 2007 1:48 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: more lost subjunctive; protest at
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At first I couldn't understand what the damned unsubjunctified headline meant.
>
>   And I've been following the news story.
>
>   JL
>
> James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: James Harbeck
> Subject: more lost subjunctive; protest at
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Headline on today's Telegraph:
>
> Mob demands teacher is shot over teddy
>
> This is about the British teacher in Sudan who let her pupils name a
> teddy bear Mohammed.
>
> The subhead on the website is "Thousands protest at sentence handed
> to British teacher for 'insulting Islam'." Note "protest at" as well
> -- a usage that to me seems newish; I see it a fair bit now, but seem
> to recall, perhaps inaccurately, that "protest" without the "at" was
> more common in times past. It's a bit of work to sort through uses in
> archives, as most hits for "protest at" aren't using the preposition
> with the verb this way -- it's either noun + prep or the "at" starts
> the next sentence.
>
> James Harbeck.
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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