"Word" words?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:58 PM -0400 4/27/08, James Harbeck wrote:
>>One of the few pleasures of living on the East Coast is being able to
>>use "tunafish," again.
>
>Go farther east to Newfoundland and you'll encounter a new style of
>meaning for "fish". In Nfld, "fish" means "cod" and every other fish
>is specified. I was in a restaurant in St. John's and asked about one
>menu item, "What kind of fish is it?" The answer was "Fresh." The
>alternative, as it happens, would have been "Salt." Cod can be either
>fresh or salted. But if it weren't cod, they would have said so in
>the first place.
>
Nice to know.  And for us non-Nufis, "codfish" is another instance of
the phenomenon under discussion.  Curiously, though, *"scrodfish" is
not--at least I've never heard it, even though scrod is a kind of cod
(when it isn't figuring as the imperfect subjunctive of a certain
verb in the punch line of a certain joke).

LH

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