molest, n.

[Charles C Doyle]

I'm wondering, though, whether legal parlance has a distinctive tendency to nominalize words, whether by clipping or plain function shift.  In Georgia, at least, there is a crime named "drunk and disorderly" (not "drunkenness and disorder"):  "He was charged with drunk and disorderly last night."  Similarly with "snatch and grab"?

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Arnold Zwicky [zwicky at STANFORD.EDU]
Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 7:49 PM

On Jun 27, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> I don't understand -- GB shows several usages of "sexual molest" before
> 1990, the earliest in 1967. They are all snippets, and several are
> periodicals, so I cannot verify the dates, but it would indicate usage
> before 1994.

that's still a hundred years after the previous OED cite.  my point was that the old usage of the noun "molest" died out in the 19th century, and that what we have now is a fresh creation (by clipping).

i'll revise my posting to make this clear.

arnold

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