that = "where"

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Just"? "JUST"??

Leaving out little bits like that is what helped bring down the Anglo-Saxon
tongue to the level of Middle English.  And I won't even mention what
happened to Proto-Indo-European.

I bet they didn't notice it was happening then, either.

JL

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 12:55 PM, 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: that = "where"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:40 PM -0400 7/20/09, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >This doesn't sound too "new," but the example impressed me (somewhat
> >paraphrased):
> >
> >Brooklyn man, about 35, on CNN: "I wanted to open a place that people
> could
> >gather and relax and exchange views."
> >
> >JL
> >
> Or he just left out the "in" after "gather"?  Following, or rather
> pre-empting, Jerry Cohen, this could also be seen as a syntactic
> blend of "where people could gather" and "that people could gather
> in".
>
> LH
>
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