"Let's get you that tattoo finished."

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:
> I remember an American professor's remarking on my saying (quite innocently) "I'm waiting for her to send me that data". Â He maintained that such pre-posed datives were at best uncommon in American English and that he would have had to say "I'm waiting for her to send that data to me". Â What do others think?

You're familiar with the expression,

"Man is the measure of all things"

?

That should be modified to read,

"One's own opinion is the measure of all things."

Not that I claim that I myself am above all that. Were I to be
suddenly imbued with Hitler-like power, the first thing that *I* would
do is to fix, i.e. stabilize, the literary form of the English
language, whether spoken or written, according to *my* personal
preferences, such that, among other things, the use of "reverse
substitution" would be punishable by maiming. In like manner, any
"correcting" of anyone else's speech not in line with the way that I
want English to be, as in the case that Damien adduces, would be
punishable by maiming in any fashion that appealed to the person
corrected.

I prefer maiming to execution. What's the point of punishment that
merely terminates suffering instead of extending and increasing it?
Isn't increasing suffering the whole point of the perhaps dekkids-long
residency on "death" row endured by the condemned, as opposed to
immediate execution of the death sentence right in the courtroom?

--
-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

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