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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thy erudition is like a bracing draught from the Pierian Spring.

Still sounds wrong, though.

JL

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Pied noir: an American connection? or maybe not...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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