HDAS rides again!

[Jonathan Lighter]

Around 1960 I owned a paperback of reprinted Hank Ketcham cartoons called _Dennis the Menace Rides Again!_

  Thanks, Wilson, for placing HDAS in that august company, which includes both Destry and the Lone Ranger.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: HDAS rides again!
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In HDAS, one finds the following:

"_behind_ prep. Esp. Black E. 2.b. because of; from; as a result of, etc."

In the Friday, July 6, 2007 edition of The Boston Globe, I read the
following headline:

"Cleaner Streets Behind Towing."

I thought: Oh. Okay. Towing parked cars makes it easier to clean the
streets. Cleaner streets have come about as a result of the towing of
parked cars out of the way of the streetsweepers.

However, after I read the article, it became clear that The Globe had
not hired any monodialectal BE-speaking headline-writers. Rather, it
turned out that what the headline was meant to convey was that the
_desire_ for cleaner streets was _motivating_ the towing of parked
cars and not that the _towing_ of parked cars was _resulting_ in
cleaner streets.

-Wilson
--
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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