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

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Apr 9 20:20:43 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Preach!

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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