"A park"

[Jonathan Lighter]

For the r-less it's even more concise.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "A park"
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At 10:21 AM -0600 12/13/07, Barbara Need wrote:
>I was just in the Post Office and the clerk asked a customer to look
>outside to see there were "a park". She repeated herself, so I'm sure
>that's what she said. He stuck his head out, looked around and said
>that it was all full up. I realized as I headed out that she was
>looking for a parking space!
>
>Barbara

I like it. G. K. Zipf ("High frequency is the cause of small
magnitude") would approve. "A park" is even more concise than the
French word for a parking spot, viz. "un parking". And of course in
Chicago it's unlikely that one would expect to find an actual
(old-fashioned) park outside, so homonymy wouldn't get to rear its
ugly head.

LH

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