"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Dave Wilton]

I thought faint praise at first. (And I did add other variables, so it
wasn't a straightforward prescriptive-descriptive analysis.) But from the
context "complicated" is clearly being used in the sense of "elucidated the
complexity of."

I've always been partial to, "there are three types of people in the world,
those who are good at math and those that aren't."


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Joel S. Berson
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 7:53 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

At 3/23/2011 05:11 PM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>I just got feedback from a presentation I gave yesterday on 18th
>century grammars that included this written by a fellow grad student
>(who I assume is Canadian, as I believe I'm the only USAn in the class):
>
>"Dave did a really great job of complicating the
>descriptive/prescriptive binary w/ his analysis of the 4 grammarians
>he looked at."

Faint praise?

And I am reminded of the famous saying "There are two kinds of
grammaroams in the world.  Those who divide the world into two parts,
and those who don't.

Joel

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