"Railway" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE



> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jesse Sheidlower
> Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 3:02 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Railway"
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Railway"
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
>
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:45:46PM -0500, Wilson Gray wrote:
> > Jesse Sheidlower writes:
> >
> > ' ... [P]erhaps even the use of "railway" is odd for an
> American source."
> >
> > FWIW, "railway" sounds okay to me. It actually appears to be used
> > interchangeably. E.g., the Texas & Pacific Railway (the "T&P") is a
> > unit of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad (the "MoPac"). My father once
> > "ran on the road" on the Sunshine Special, a MoPac-T&P train
> > celebrated in a blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson.
>
> Both _railway_ and _railroad_ are in use in Britain and
> America, but there's a distinct preference for the former in
> the former and the latter in the latter. Ben Zimmer ran some
> numbers in the Oxford Corpus demonstrating this connection
> clearly. I think this is an interesting pair to compare,
> because it's not the sort of binary thing where the forms are
> totally different (e.g. _windscreen_ and _boot_ are almost
> exclusively British, and _windshield_ and _trunk_ almost
> exclusively American), but there's more of a flow. Yet within
> this flow, the pattern is pretty clear.
>
> Also, it seems to be the case that in America _railway_ is
> limited to reference to railway companies, as in your
> examples, whereas in Britain it's used more broadly.

"Railway" is also commonly pre-WWI to refer to the trolleys and
streetcars that were ubiquitous back then.  Search for
"street railway" in Google Books, or the other archives.  Often
it would refer to a particular company, as Jesse states, but
also it would mean the local system, or the generic idea of
trolleys on rail tracks.


>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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