millionaire (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

That's "nattering nabobs of negativism."

And "self-confessed."

JL

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 8:17 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: millionaire (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Apr 17, 2012, at 6:46 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> > It's a good shrubbery... [the following is not meant to be criticism--at
> > least, not of Garson]
> >
> > Two minor points--"nabob" has not been the same since Spiro Agnew.
>
> Not to mention the ADS's own William Safire, self-proclaimed wordsmith of
> "nabobs of negativism".
>
> LH
>
> > I
> > suspect, if you ask an average monolingual American what it means,
> > "wealthy individual" is going to be very low on the list of responses.
> >
>
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