parochial school (UNCLASSIFIED)
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Apr 5 19:14:42 UTC 2011
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
> After looking into it for a short while, it appears to me that
> "parochial school" has two distinct usages -- one which includes Roman
> Catholic and other religious schools, and one which is only Roman
> Catholic schools (that is, some people use "parochial school" in a way
> which specifically excludes non-RC schools).
>
I.e., for some speakers, _parochial_ is redundantly Catholic.
OTOH, there are other speakers for whom _Catholic_ is redundantly "parochial."
As a graduate of an elite - or should that be "elitist"? - Catholic
prep school under the auspices of the the legendary "Blackrobes" of
the Jesuit Order, it always sets my teeth on edge when such schools -
and others run by the Benedictines, the Christian Brothers, the
Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Salesians, the Augustinians (Martin
Luther's order), etc. - are lumped together with the Papist equivalent
of mere public - in the American sense - schools.
Uh, with the above I'm trending toward facetiousness, not seriousness.
BTW, wasn't the old phrase, "kidding on the sly," IIRC, once used to
describe such speech or writing?
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list