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

[Victor Steinbok]

My snark merer is completely off today... need to recharge the
batteries, I guess. Going to watch Futurama and Family Guy ...

No excuse for that one... Funny, my first reaction was to dismiss it as
a snark, then, once I was replying to Larry, I thought I'd throw this
in... *facepalm* I'm usually better than this...

     VS-)

On 4/9/2012 2:09 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> 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

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