heart-rendering

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Feb 15, 2008, at 8:56 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

>  But just to be clear: my students have been using "heart-rendering"
> for decades, but so far as I remember only in the sense (like "heart-
> rending") of "painfully affecting; so tragic you can't stand it."
>
>  Dr. Peters does a double jump: his "heart-rendering" is something
> positive.

ah, i see that i didn't read your original posting carefully enough.
so, possibly a "private meaning" for "heart-rendering" -- a meaning
wrongly induced from context (though preserving the 'powerfully
affecting' component of meaning), like the next example you provide:

>  In a similar vein, a few years back I knew a student who used
> "tearjerker" in a positive way.
>  E.g., "'Come Up from the Fields, Father,' is Whitman's famous
> tearjerker about the Civil War." He went on to say how affecting it
> was.  I suspect this is pretty common.

the next one is a private meaning that might have been arrived at by
reasoning from the form of the word:

>  Another dude, in a letter to the _Atlantic_, insisted that a
> "stemwinder" was a long, tedious speech, because it made the
> audience check their watches; then they'd fiddle with them.

arnold

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