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

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 9, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> 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-)

I do like the idea of a snark meter, or even more of a snarkometer, with stress on the connector.

LH

>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org