The narrowing of vocabulary

[Jonathan Lighter]

Come to think of it, I too learned in school that a square was a kind of
rectangle.

The knowledge was so far removed from my normal understanding that I forgot
it almost immediately.

JL

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: The narrowing of vocabulary
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> > No and yes.
>
>
> Sigh! Ain't *that* a bitch?
>
> I hate it when *my* knowledge is rendered empty of content by other
> people's ignorance. (FYI, "other people's ignorance" is based upon the
> BE phrase, "other people's children" - or "OPC" - used to down  others
> with whose actions one is not in agreement. Gnome sane?)
>
> Yeah, yeah. I know. Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and others
> better-known than I no doubt had that same feeling, WRT to the
> language-change going on around them in their respective days. But I
> learned that a square and an oblong were varieties of rectangle in the
> first grade.
>
> As Dave Chappelle would put it:
>
> "In the FIRST GRADE, niggaz! IN THE FIRST GRADE!!!"
>
> Our teacher gave us each cardboard cut-outs and then rapped to us what
> we needed to know.
>
> And now that knowledge is worthless. :-(
>
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
> [Mark, baby, you stone *saying* a taste!]
>
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-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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