fraught

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jun 19 14:53:47 UTC 2009


Maybe, Charlie, but I think it amounts to the same thing.

Anyway, they're using it a lot: I've seen it in the _New Yorker_ and heard
it on CNN.
New to me.

JL
On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: fraught
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Maybe rather than being elliptical for the idiomatic phrase, the use of
> "fraught" just recovers the older sense of 'freighted' ('burdened' or
> 'carrying baggage')?
>
> --Charlie
> _____________________________________________________________
>
> ---- Original message ----
> >Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:59:13 -0400
> >From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> >Subject: fraught
> >
> >I can't find it in the Archives.  Short for "fraught with difficulties or
> complications." Here's an ex. from a learned colleague:
> >
> >2009 Brian Boyd _On the Origin of Stories_ (Cambridge: Belknap) 56: If
> cooperation is is fairly easy to establish, yet already fraught, among close
> kin, how can it extend even among non-kin?
> >
> >No earlier instance of "fraught" in the book.  My impression is that it's
> becoming a bit faddish in the media.
> >
> >JL
>
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