emerita

[George Thompson]

Prof. Bob Fowkes, once chair of the NYU German Dept., used to offer this etymology of "emeritus": "ex" = "you're out"; "meritus" = and you deserve to be out.

Most men, when boys, take a baseball player or movie star for a role model; Bob took the Indo-Europeans as his role model, because they had thought up so many neat languages, and before he died he had learned most of them.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 3:23 pm
Subject: emerita
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> See anything funny inthis blurb from the webstite of an academic journal
> http://journal.oraltradition.org/authors/show/377 ?:
>
> "William Merritt Sale, Professor Emerita of Classics and
> ComparativeLiterature at Washington University, has published
> extensively on Homer,
> South Slavic, and Romance epic as well as other classical areas."
>
> JL
> --
> "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

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