WOW WOTW: 'Monte-Shark Pattern' (Ok, it's not _A_ word!)
Mark Mandel
thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Tue May 6 02:41:41 UTC 2008
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Doug Harris <cats22 at frontiernet.net> wrote:
> It's not often, in my experience, that you can count, on a single
> page, the _authentic_ hits from the count Google offers up on a
> particular word or phrase.
> "Monte-shark pattern" offers such an opportunity.
> I spotted it in a book review offered to me by Powell's. Turns
> out, exactly the same review -- thus a second Google hit -- was
> distributed by the NY Review of Books.
> Those two hits represent 50% of the legitimate ones reported by
> Google just now.
> A total of FOUR _real_ HITS (of seven Google reported.
> And it's a cool (neat? george?) phrase, too -- one whose meaning
> could be stretched to include the patter of most any kind of fast-
> talking street or flea market vendor.
>
Surely that was "Monte-shark patter", not "pattern". I get 1 googit, which
expands on request to 58 of the identical text.
--
Mark Mandel
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list