Early texting?

[Mark Mandel]

I was thinking of "aqua fortis" to mean 'hard liquor', but OED has
only the chemical meaning. Still, could it be?

m a m

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> At 4/18/2009 07:35 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>I think "TP" = "tippy" = "extremely fashionable".
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
>>I think "AQ" probably should  = "ague", but the "fortie" is a mystery to
>>me, and I think the line may be garbled somehow. (Is the original
>>printed with long "s" which looks like "f", BTW?)
>
> As I wrote originally, there are (at least) two publications of this
> poem in Early American Newspapers. Â While they differ in some
> respects, most if not all of the differences are due to sloppy
> punctuation and printing in the earlier copy. Â But here both are
> identical, "AQfortie" is set without an intervening space (the second
> publication properly includes some word spacing that is absent in the
> first, so I assume this instance is as intended), and to the best of
> my eyesight it is not a long "s". Â But your eyes may vary, and you're
> welcome to look yourself.
>
> Joel
>
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>



--
Mark Mandel

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org