"maroonage" not in OED?!

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:21 PM -0500 11/21/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>What are "runaway slaves establishing communities"? What is an
>"establishing community" to begin with?
>
>-Wilson

I suspect the intended parsing is that with
[runaway slaves] as the subject and [establishing
communities] as the predicate, so there's no
implication of any "establishing community".
Perhaps clearer would have been "the act of
runaway slaves establishing communities".  But
the structure is that of "For me, the best part
of an academic meeting is [[hungry linguists]
[devouring spicy food]]".

LH

>
>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.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
>
>
>On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the
>>mail header -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>>  Subject:      "maroonage" not in OED?!
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Apparently "maroonage" -- runaway slaves
>>  establishing communities -- is not in the OED as
>>  of draft revisions June 2008.  Nor is there a
>>single instance in a quotation.
>>
>>  Google Books has "maroonage" back to 1817
>>  (François Alexandre Stanislaus Wimpffen, A Voyage
>>  to Saint Domingo ..., tr. by J. Wright, p. 230)
>>  and 1824 (James Stephen, Slavery of the British
>>  West India Colonies Delineated ..., vol. 1, p. 290).
>>
>>  Joel
>>
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