fellow

[Dan Goncharoff]

What exactly is a "fellow writer"? Just another way of saying "another
writer"?

I think I expect a tighter connection between fellows than simply following
the same line of work. Perhaps even membership in some professional
organization would satisfy this, but I think there is a need for some shared
experience.

DanG

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      fellow
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There is something interesting going on here, but, of course, I can't
> put my finger on it. Here's a line from E&P story on Cameron receiving
> the Columnist of the Year award.
>
> http://goo.gl/k11VW
> > Cameron and his fellow writer, Cathryn Michon, were married Nov. 27,
> > 2010, in Pacific Palisades, Calif. They spent a "working honeymoon"
> > collaborating on the screenplay for the movie.
>
> This seems to be a perfectly ordinary passage, but "his fellow writer"
> jumped at me. I would have written "a fellow writer", and likely would
> have corrected it the same way as an editor or a grader. But I could not
> figure out why it bothered me so much. There is some overspecificity
> here, but should it trigger a strong reaction?
>
> I did a quick Google search for "his fellow". There is no way to analyze
> all the hits (35M+), but I scanned the first 150 or so and there /was/ a
> pattern. Save for one biblical passage ("his fellow servant"), /every
> single hit/ showed this combination modifying a plural. So it's "his
> fellow soldiers", "his fellow Democrats", etc. Not one singular noun.
>
> It would be an overstatement that this is the whole story. Adding common
> singular nouns to "his fellow" (soldier, writer, robot, student) gets
> quite a few hits, although it's two orders of magnitude lower and
> includes both singular and plural versions (unlike GB, the main Google
> engine knows that they are related). But, the point is, there are cases
> of "his fellow" with singular nouns. They are just not showing up near
> the top of Google search.
>
> Are there any usage notes on this? Any related/relevant observations? Or
> am I just nitpicking again?
>
>     VS-)
>
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