Proposal: A separate antedatings list

Jesse Sheidlower jester at PANIX.COM
Sun Nov 4 15:29:54 UTC 2007


On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:52:10PM +0000, ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
>
> It is ironic that all these strictly lexicographical matters
> are posted to the "dialect" list & not the DSNA. It is largely
> just a matter of history, but also: does DSNA archive its
> entries? And if so, & if we posted antedatings and culinary
> terms there, archive searchers would have to enter their
> searches 3 times instead of 2 (which Jesse S thinks somehow
> would be more inconvenient than having to delete numerous
> unwanted messages every day).

Uh, the culinary postings seem to me to be not even remotely
lexicographical--these are entirely about regional variation
in American English, but are not things that would go into
most dictionaries, and are thus suited for ADS-L but not DSNA,
all other considerations aside.

Ron, if the problem is that you don't like this one category
of postings, can I suggest that you just set a filter on the
poster who generates the vast majority of them? This seems to
be possible in AOL (thanks to Grant for finding the link):

http://help.channels.aol.com/kjump.adp?articleId=217148#faq1

And it's widely possible in most other e-mail clients. I'd
think this one-time effort would be more convenient than
either deleting numerous unwanted messages or compelling
various people to perform multiple searches, etc.

Jesse Sheidlower

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



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