Caption on a nature site: "Ruby-_Throat_ Hummingbird"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jul 8 16:27:18 UTC 2012


On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> one-arm man

Amazing! This ought to be nonsense. It's like the mirror-image of the
name of a cattle-brand, like the "Double-R Bar" of Roy Rogers or Bobby
Benton's "B-Bar-B." "Doubled-R'ed-Bar" and "B-Barred-B" can make sense
only if you already know what the brands look like, before hearing
their names.

Well, if -ed adds nothing to the meaning for you, why would you bother with it?

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



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