new (to me) lexical item: "concern trolling"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> On 4/9/2012 1:22 PM, Martin Kaminer wrote:
>> I really don't think it's constructive for our group to be focusing on this
>> term; I believe it would be wise for us to devote ourselves solely to
>> traditional dialect analysis and not get wrapped up in things that are so
>> contemporary.  The best course for us IMHO would be to restrict ourselves
>> to examining usage from the 19th Century at the latest, ideally earlier,
>> because of the availability of references and the scholastic consensus that
>> comes with time.
[...]
> As for Martin's comment, I am not sure who "us" is. If this is a
> restriction to active, paying ADS members, I'll defer to them. But if
> the comment is to everyone on this list, I fundamentally disagree. We
> now have opportunities available to analyze language change and
> variation as it happens--opportunities that have never before been
> available or have been in development for several generations. Had we
> had such resources in the 1940s and 50s, we might know today where
> "nerd" and "Murphy's law" came from. As it stands, we have to guess
> instead. This is like telling mathematicians that they can't use
> computers in their research because traditional pure mathematics does
> not allow for this possibility. Although there are purists who believe
> just that, for the majority of practitioners this just sounds silly.

Victor, I believe you've been meta-concern-trolled! :->

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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