"Fraught" and "revert" (was Re: travesty)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>> It's a lot like the clippery reanalyses in "chili" (for the
>> stew) or "happy as a clam" (for "happy as a clam at high tide"), or
>> more prosaically "private", "general", "vacuum", "substance-free",...
>
> Or "fraught" -- which we've discussed here, and which I tackle again
> in a response to an On Language reader question this week (look for it
> online tomorrow at <http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/>).

Sorry, got the schedule confused. The "fraught" response came out two weeks ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-onlanguage-t.html

This week's reader question is about a peculiar usage of "revert" to
mean 'reply':

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06FOB-onlanguage-t.html


--Ben Zimmer

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