How prevalent is the silent "t"

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jun 13 17:06:49 UTC 2007


I'm sure I've seen it before, in announcements and reports. But without
attending the event, or reading or hearing a description in some detail, I
wouldn't have known that it had no religious content.

And, thinking of that, I wouldn't expect an announcement to specify
explicitly that the service was non-religious, so how would I know when a
"service" was nonreligious? The only memorial I can remember where an
announcement might have been explicit in that regard (memory fades at this
distance) was similar to your mother's, for a colleague of mine in the 1980s
who was an active neopagan and virulently opposed to most organized religion
(for herself; she wasn't a [anti-] missionary), including the Roman
Catholicism she had been raised in. The funeral was conducted by a priest,
but he cited her explicit wish at the beginning and he honored it.

-- Mark
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]


On 6/13/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
> >Is it possible that they are being maliciously subscribed by other
> parties?
>
> Not very flattering to us to think it would be malicious to the
> subscribees... But if malicious to us, well, I'm sure there could be
> someone(s) lurking on the list who collect email addresses of
> particularly crusty and dull sorts and subscribe them just to throw a
> bobcat in the swimming pool. I was wondering about that earlier today.
>
> James Harbeck.
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list