Pied noir: an American connection? or maybe not...

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:39 PM -0500 1/18/10, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Evidently so. But again, the nickname was more derisive than contemptuous,
>or so it seems today.
>
>To enlarge a bit further on recent reclamations.  They seem to have been
>"reclaimed" chiefly by postmodernists in fields like "cultural studies."
>  How many of them, I wonder, would feel fine about using the words
>nonchalantly to persons on the lower slopes of  Trendy Mountain?
>
>Also, "reclamation" is an odd word, since the targeted groups never
>"claimed" them in the first place.
>
>JL

No, but that's a standard feature of re- words, as pointed out by
David Dowty in his 1979 book "Word Formation in Montague Grammar",
and more informally by Jim McCawley and Jerry Morgan back in the
1960s, all of them involving the "internal" readings (cause to be
again X, where X is the relevant state) of verbs with prefixes like
re- (and un-) or its adverbial paraphrase with "again". If someone
analyzes the data, I can come along and reanalyze it without my
having analyzed in the first place.  Or I can restate or rephrase
something you stated/phrased (causing it to come to be stated/phrased
again) without my having stated it first.  Or if the metal has become
crooked, I can hammer it flat again (without my having hammered it
earlier).  This case is a bit more abstract (and of course involves
the nominalized form of the verb, "reclaim"), but I take it it's
those who applied the slur who are seen as "claiming" it, and those
to whom it applied who then *re*claim it, i.e. claiming it back the
way a nation might recapture seized territory that they hadn't had to
capture in the first place.

LH

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