RE "Shoot beaver"?

[Ronald Butters]

Huck was right about Widder Douglas, but George is wrong to imply that I done it myself.

I don't think I forwarded a private message to the list without receiving the sender's permission, and if I did so, I apologize. It does appear that the forwarded message was totally innocuous, so maybe I just assumed that George would not mind my continuing the discussion that the group was involved with.

More importantly, I'm not at all sure that my purpose was merely "to comment on 18th century practices," but even if it was, that is not in the least related to my protest that the discussion of "shoot beaver" was tedious and trivial, of the order of, "I think this term was used 20 years ago in a movie, but maybe it wasn't, maybe it was something that somebody said about the movie, maybe, or maybe not."

Aboout 95% of what gets posted here is just rambling anecdote or comment on somebody or other's typographical error or grammatical or lexical "mistake," or some regional or social dialectal feature that could be found in a dictionary. Or worse, just somebody saying something like, "I agree" or "Thanks for that" or "How clever I am, I studied Latin 50 years ago." I spend a considerable part of each day just deleting messages without opening them: after you have read one entry in a thread, it is gnerallyu pretty clear that the rest is not worth bothering with.

I guess this just means that I need to go the way of Roger Shuy, Dennis Preston, etc., and sign off from the list. The occasional interesting item is increasingly buried in a sea of trivial anecdote. A lot of people seem to find the list as it has become is really what they want to do in their retirement or  in their cups or whatever. Assuming that my dues in the American Dialect Society are not being horribly strained by the cost of recording all this junk for posterity in the University of Georgia's computer archive, I should just slink away in silence.

On Nov 10, 2010, at 12:53 PM, George Thompson wrote:

> RB writes:
>>
>> If all the heterosexual and bisexual males on this list-serv now
>> contribute their memories and associations with someone having seen
>> glimpses of uncovered female crotches in public places, members (no
>> pun intended) will have to spend even more time than usual deleting
>> the tedious messages.
>>
>
> Back in September, when I set off the prolonged "shagging and fucking" discussion here, one of the first responses was from RB:
>> I'm condfused about this. Does this mean that the speaker occasionally
>> did men as well as women?
>> On Sep 1, 2010, at 10:05 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>>
>>> as for myself I stick as close to Radicati's Arse as a Bum Bailiff
>> to Lord Deloraine'
>>
> I replied, off-list, that that was exactly what it meant.  RB forwarded my reply to the list, in order to make a comment on the sexual practices of the 18th C.
>
> As Huck says of the Widder Douglas, "of course that was all right, because she done it herself".
>
> GAT

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