Puzzling blend

[Wilson Gray]

I can easily imagine a scenario in which the sportswriter came across
"give [someone] an edge" in high-school English, misrecalled it as
"give [someone] an age" and decided that it would be the perfect
cliche to express the concept that the new guy was younger and faster.
;-)

-Wilson

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Puzzling blend
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 5/30/10 2:52 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Alice Faber<faber at haskins.yale.edu>  wrote:
>>
>> "... give the 49ers a refreshing _age_ in the Secondary"
>>
>> an exact quote?
>>
>> I would have expected
>>
>> "... give the 49ers a refreshing _edge_ in the Secondary."
>>
>
> If it was in the quotes I dredged up from Google, it was cut-and-pasted
> from the blog or whatever it was in. Sports blog comments tend to not be
> proofread all that well, though I could imagine a phonological story
> behind that spelling. That said, in that specific entry, the same player
> was described as being both from Nevada and Nebraska, so I'm going to go
> with error.
>
> --
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> Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
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--
-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

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