*Lush* life > *luxe* life?

[Wilson Gray]

And tyhat's not even strange. What's strange is something like the
shift of the seemingly-immutable word-order of strings like "I decided
_not to go_" to "I decided _to not go_," which didn't even have a
prescriptive rule against it, in my lost youth. This is not to say
that there's a prescriptive rule against it these days. I don't know.
But if *I* were writing a prescriptive grammar, there certainly would
be, even though I know that it's already been a lost cause for
dekkids. :-)

-Wilson

On 1/29/08, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: *Lush* life > *luxe* life?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 7:33 PM -0500 1/29/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >Heard on local news:
> >
> >"The Patriots are living the _luxe_ life in this five-star hotel."
> >
> >Is there anyone else old enough to remember when the comfortably
> >well-off were said to be "living the _lush_ life"?
>
> Maybe there's been a reanalysis of "deluxe life" as "de luxe life",
> with the prefix taken as the definite determiner.  Stranger things
> have happened.
>
> LH
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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