Request: Match p-l-y in 1756 document
Garson O'Toole
adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Sat Dec 4 17:06:21 UTC 2010
Joel S. Berson wrote
> "Paltry" sounds good to me -- a Royal Navy
> captain who was "peaceable" and did not fire at
> the most effective time would be "a worthless
> person or thing", at least at his job. And it
> might have been considered a libelous adjective.
>
> But if you don't like that -- Is there a
> countable number of dashes? If so, let us know
> how many. Is the dashed word capitalized, thus someone's name?
Thanks for your response Joel. The original post includes a link that
leads to the section of the document containing the censored word.
Following the link causes Google Books to display a section of the
text and clicking on this section causes an entire page to be shown.
Here is a shortened link if the original link is broken:
goo.gl/gNwIS
The word with dashes is in not capitalized. The two dashes in p-l-y
are the same length in the text. The book font characters have
variable widths. Two characters can fit within a dash length. But I
suspect the dashes are not being used to specify the number of deleted
characters.
Thanks
Garson
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list