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

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:49 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> bumblebees

Is _humble[bee]_, cognate with German, _Hummel_ - for some reason, a
common surname among ethnic Germans in Saint Louis - still in use?
Back in the day, _humblebee_ was so common in literature, _bumblebee_
being, for all practical purposes, non-occurrent, IME, that I began to
worry that _bumblebee_ might be some kind of ignorant niggerism, at
worst, or only a Southernism, at best.

"Honey bee," needless to say, and "water melon, musk melon/mush melon,
ear ring, grass hopper - cf. _clod hopper_ - cat fish, dog fish," etc.
WRT style, I take the prescriptivist stance. But, when people just
make shit up out of whole cloth, for no reason, "entsichere ich meinen
Browning!" to coin a phrase.

--
-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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