heart-rendering

[Brenda Lester]

no, no. Heartrender: think of the movie APOCALYPTO, in which the priest slashes the man's chest open and pulls out his heart.




Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
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Subject: Re: heart-rendering
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Sorry, Larry, but I don't get "heart-warming" from the AHD def. you quote. No way, no how.

Next step, to " *heartrender," i.e. "to warm the cockles of the heart of; impart a warm, fuzzy feeling to the sensibilities of." Or am I behind the curve already?

JL

Laurence Horn wrote:
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Subject: Re: heart-rendering
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At 10:40 AM -0800 2/15/08, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Just told my wife about today's use of "heart-rendering." She
>rolled hetr eyes and exclaimed, "That used to be a joke!"
>
> She recalls friends in '50s Brooklyn saying, "It was
>heart-_rendering_!" in a decidedly sarcastic manner, possibly
>imitating people who said it seriously.
>
> At any rate, it meant "heart-rending," not "heart-warming." She's
>sure of that.
>
> JL

Ah, but "heart-rending" can mean 'heart-warming' too. Even in AHD we find

'Causing anguish or deep distress; arousing deep sympathy.'

while OED still gets by with 'terribly distressing'. From 'arousing
deep sympathy' to 'heart-warming' (or some other "positive" emotive
sense) is but a short leap of the heart.

LH

>
>"Arnold M. Zwicky" wrote:
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>Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>Subject: Re: heart-rendering
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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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