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

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 20, 2012, at 11:00 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> At 2/19/2012 11:47 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> merely because you're unknowingly standing in
>> its flight path back to the wasphive or the hornethive, and suffer no
>> ill effects.
>
> Aha -- even Wilson betrays some conflation of bees and
> wasps/hornets.  Only bees have hives -- wasps and hornets have
> nests.  (A bee can have a nest too, if it's not provided by a
> human.  But that isn't in question here.)
>
Yes, the big question a while back was whether the third book in Larsson's trilogy should be rendered as _The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest_ or _The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest_, but hives were not part of the dispute.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org