v/l reversal - revelation

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Dec 7 16:48:15 UTC 2008


At 12:18 AM +0800 12/8/08, Randy Alexander wrote:
>On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 6:57 AM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
>>  Subject:      v/l reversal - revelation
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Relevation did not pass muster for my spell checker. It is a word ("a
>>  raising or lifting up according to the Free Dictionary), and has 97K
>>  Googits, but I think most are l/v reversals for revelation. The Urban
>>  Dictionary in fact has two entries clearly meaning revelation. BB
>
>It's not just v/l.  Here's one I just caught: dymanic:
>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZlunw0FHaU
>
>At 1:10

M/n reversals are far from unknown; here's one I came across in print
this week.

In _The Semantics of Murder_, a novel I've been reading based in part
of the life and violent death of formal semanticist Richard Montague,
the would-be biographer of the Montague stand-in notes that "it is
possible for the same statement to be true and not true at the same
time".  She attributes this observation to Montague's teacher Alfred
Tarski, who, she notes, "was talking about antimonies".  It's not
made clear what that particular metallic element has to do with
violations of Aristotle's law of non-contradiction.

LH

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