"---- choice"

[Joel S. Berson]

Can we correct this problem by introducing "Hobsonian choice"?

Where is the discussion of the Charles Laughton movie?

And a minor prescriptivist quibble:  shouldn't "a choice between
nasty, brutish, and short" be "among"?

Joel

At 3/28/2009 10:32 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Mar 28, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:
>
>>Last night on MSNBC Chris Matthews referred to President Obama's
>>approach to the Afghanistan situation as a "Hobbesian choice."  A
>>slip of the tongue? A malapropism? Or was he suggesting that life in
>>that beleaguered realm will always be nasty, brutish, and short? Or
>>did he really mean not a "Hobson's choice" but rather (as an old
>>idiom has it) a "choice of evils"?
>
>longish entry on the ecdb here:
>   http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/593/hobbesian/
>with references to discussions on the STUMPERS list, on ADS-L, and on
>Language Log.
>
>arnold
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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