"Word" words?

[Joel S. Berson]

Don't restaurant menus generally leave the word "fish" out?

Joel

At 4/28/2008 11:32 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org