cold cuts.

[Joel S. Berson]

At 8/31/2010 02:46 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >  I include ham, corned beef,
> > pastrami, etc.  (And they required the presence of cheese.)  _As does
> > the OED_ (except for the cheese).
>
>Different strokes for different folks, I reckon.
>
>BTW, what's up with the constant appeals to authority? Is a person to
>be considered at least ill-informed, if not insane, if his concept of
>reality doesn't jibe with some printed definition?

Yes.  Of course.  People have been certified for less.

>I thought that this
>was a site about the way English *is* spoken, not about the way
>English perhaps *was* spoken by a defined subset of its
>native-speakers, at the the time that some once-authoritative
>reference work was compiled.

No.  You surely would not rule out "discovery" and publication (here)
of antedatings?

And the "appeal to authority" is just a pointer to instances of use
of a word or phrase that support one's assertion that some people
wrote like that at some time.

Joel

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