go missing

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Jun 7 15:35:56 UTC 2009


At 8:11 AM -0700 6/7/09, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Jun 7, 2009, at 7:32 AM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>
>>
>>Do they also rage against "The eggs have gone bad" and "The bread
>>has gone
>>stale" ... and for that matter, "My brother got into rough company
>>and went
>>bad"?
>>
>>m a m
>>
>>On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>it's astonishing how much passion this idiom raises in americans.
>>>we've seen Robert Hartwell Fiske's contempt for it.  it was Grammar
>>>Girl's Pet Peeve of 2008 --
>>>...
>
>of course not.  people don't rage against expressions (however
>idiomatic) which are familiar to them and which they use themselves.
>they rage against expressions that strike them as innovations (and
>expressions that they believe to be used primarily by suspect groups,
>like kids,

--or Brits, who don't even know how to pronounce their final -r's or
know what "lift", "knocked up", and "pissed" mean.  What do *they*
know about speaking English?

LH

>or primarily in suspect contexts, like advertising).
>

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