Quick meaning alive

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Yesterday's crossword used "coney" as a synonym for 'rabbit'. It survives (I assume) in "Coney Island" (but with few people for whom the first word is more than an empty meaning). It lives on also for scholars and maybe dialectologists. So I'd call it rare or scholarly or specialized, but not obsolete or merely archaic. Ditto "quick" = 'alive'.
------Original Message------
From: Benjamin Zimmer
Sender: ADS-L
To: ADS-L
ReplyTo: ADS-L
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Quick meaning alive
Sent: Jan 2, 2010 5:42 PM

On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> IMO, _quickening_ must still be quick (in the archaic sense) for a
> fairly large percentage of speakers, given that there was a movie
> entitled "The Quickening." OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised to discover
> that, for the majority of those who went to see the movie, its title
> had no referent other than as the title of a movie.

When the 1995 Sam Raimi western "The Quick and the Dead" came out, I
don't the moviemakers were counting on audiences knowing about the
Athanasian Creed. In fact, one of the movie's taglines uses the modern
sense of "quick", while another alludes to it:

"Think you're quick enough?"
"In this town, you're either one or the other."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114214/taglines


--Ben Zimmer

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