buck?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Oct 26 04:12:44 UTC 2010


At 7:39 PM -0400 10/25/10, Laurence Horn wrote:
>At 2:57 PM -0400 10/25/10, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>>It is covered in HDAS, s.v. _buck_ n. sense 2.e.
>>
>>Jesse Sheidlower
>>OED
>
>And here in an earlier thread (with many examples from athletes
>weighing or batting a buck seventy-five).

As Al Michaels, announcer on Monday Night (now Tuesday Morning)
Football just reminded me by saying "A buck 18 left", bucks in
sporting contests can also be minutes as well as .100 of batting
average or 100 of pounds.  I think it helps to have the second
figure--"a buck 18" works better to convey 'one minute 18 seconds'
than just "a buck" would do to convey 'one minute'.

>
>But on a different topic, nobody has mentioned the elegant little
>biography of Sol Steinmetz from today's Times.  It's by Margalit
>Fox, former linguistics student who has excelled at other ling obits
>in the past; I remember her piece on Jim McCawley fondly.  (Nice
>quote from Jesse at the end on this one.)
>
>LH

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