heart-rendering

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:50 AM -0800 2/15/08, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>In his prepared public statement on yesterday's campus shootings,
>NIU President John Peters described the outpouring of public
>sympathy as "renewing and heart-rendering."  He used the word
>"heart-rendering" in this connection twice within one minute.
>
>   This is the first time I've heard "heart-rendering" [sic] used as
>a synomnym for "moving; heart-warming."
>
>   JL

You've been living a (perhaps enviably) sheltered life.  I'm quite
sure I've heard it, and a rather substantial number of the 56,100 or
so raw g-hits involve naive occurrences, as opposed to screeds by
prescriptivists (some detailing with delightful gruesomeness what the
process of rendering a heart would entail) that would presumably be
unnecessary in the absence of other naive occurrences...

LH, wondering why Eudora thinks I made up not only "prescriptivists"
but "screed"

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