doing stupid

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jul 1 23:28:46 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Alison Murie<sagehen7470 at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Alison Murie <sagehen7470 at ATT.NET>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: doing stupid
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 1, 2009, at 11:08 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: doing stupid
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 10:57 AM -0400 7/1/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>> At 7/1/2009 10:40 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>> the older
>>>> "Handsome is as handsome does" (somehow that one sounds as though it
>>>> belongs in the mouth of one of Jane Austen's unsympathetic snippy
>>>> minor female characters),
>>>
>>> Does Larry know how fortunate he is that he did not address this to
>>> the "Long Eighteenth Century" email list -- where Jane Austen is the
>>> second most popular subject? Â (I leave unsaid the first.)
>>>
>>> Joel
>>>
>> Why fortunate? Â She specialized in such characters, along with
>> equally unsympathetic and oblivious but usually more overbearing
>> minor male characters, than whom the sympathetic female and male
>> characters are far superior morally, intellectually, and in every
>> other way (except sometimes in the purse).
>>
>> LH
> I agree about the sympathetic & unsympathetic characters, in JA, but I
> do not associate
> "handsome is as handsome does" Â with any of her people. Â Is it really
> found that early?
> I think  of it as later  XIX  early XX Cent. Dickens, maybe; Mary
> Poppins probably said it, or at least someone in that
> household.
> (It was an expression peculiarly annoying to my kids, even the two who
> went to school in England,
> as utterly incomprehensible; so much so that it became a sort of
> family joke.) Â I can remember
> Â being puzzled by it as a kid, until the significance of "as" dawned
> on me.
> AM
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

I don't recall that I was ever hung up on the "as." What I had a
problem with, as a child, was understanding how you could *behave* in
such a manner as to become more *physically* attractive than you
already naturally were. One time, at band camp, I tried it, but I
couldn't see that being have mattered, WRT my looks.
--
-Wilson
–––
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

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