"Bees' nest"?!!! WTF!!!

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Ronald Butters <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
> There are over 3,500,000 Google hits for "hornet's nest."

Well, clearly, that licenses the use of "bees' nest" in place of the
obsolescent "beehive." I regret the error. But why would Colbert state
that a bees' nest harbors *yellowjackets*? In the Carolinas, is the
yellowjacket a variety of bee? In East Texas, the yellowjacket is a
very common kind of *wasp* that lives in what is termed, locally, a
"wasp('s) nest," whereas bees are said to live in structures still
archaically referred to, locally, as "beehives."

But my point was merely that only some kind of pointy-headed
pseudo-intellectual would concern himself with trivialities like
lexicon, syntax, phonology, etc., particularly in the face of language
change, when all that truly matters is semantics. The point of
language is communication, after all. As long as that end is realized,
concern with anything other than that is of no more intrinsic interest
or value to mankind than the computation of the ultimate - if there is
one; as a Greek friend of mine likes to say, "It's mathematics to me"
- value of pi.

--
-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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