"Shoot beaver"?

David Bowie db.list at PMPKN.NET
Fri Nov 12 05:44:04 UTC 2010


From:    Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> At 4:52 PM -0800 11/11/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>> On Nov 11, 2010, at 11:18 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

>>>   ... Even under the best of circumstances, it's unlikely
>>>   that the "top cream," as we say in (some parts of?) East Texas, of the
>>>   field would ever post their works-in-progress to a listserv in order
>>>   to sollicit the random opinions of the field's hoi polloi, as opposed
>>>   to consulting personally with friends and colleagues who are their
>>>   fellow-specialists in a given niche in the broader field of
>>>   elephantology, as they do now.

>> i, for one, have fairly often done exactly that, and then given
>> ADS-L and its participants credit in the result. it's gotten harder
>> and harder to do, sadly.

> While not necessarily swimming in that pool of cream (for one thing I
> suspect I'm lactose intolerant), I've certainly bounced a variety of
> hypotheses off the list over the years and I've done my share of
> solicitation of data that were later published...

<mid-sentence snip>

This sort of thing doesn't necessarily happen on this list all *that*
much (though it does happen, certainly), but there's a fairly active
community of sociolinguists on Facebook where that's the normal practice
(led by David Durian, but he's kind of an extreme case—he's essentially
posting his dissertation a chapter or two at a time), and there are
other, perhaps more specialized mailing lists where that's what's
regularly done.

--
David Bowie

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