British bias in the OED :-)
George Thompson
george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Mon Dec 17 16:23:16 UTC 2012
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
> In that case, the school colors of all universities should be in the OED.
> And the mascots and symbols of all big-league sports teams.
>
To the extent that readers may encounter sentences like "He is [a color]",
meaning "he is a graduate of [a school]".
I don't know how common this would be, in the U. S. I attended Boston U.,
but do not expect to be referred to as a Red (except in the political
sense). I do see the sports teams from Syracuse &c. referred to as The
Orangemen, &c; and the teams of other schools referred to as "The Badgers",
&c. The overall context of whatever writing contains such designations
will probably make clear what they signify, but the sentence out of context
will puzzle.
Is this a problem that a comprehensive dictionary should try to address?
--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
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