"Collateral damage" > "collateral"

[Jonathan Lighter]

There's some new commercial,  which says, essentially, that if you were a
superspy, you could discover all kinds of secrets "with no collateral
damage."

It seems to imply "no detectable consequences."  But who knows?

Especially since it's an ad for a bank.

JL

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 7:10 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Collateral damage" > "collateral"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mar 31, 2012, at 3:45 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >
> > "Possible discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are
> > justified as acceptable _collateral_."
> >
> > Taken from the abstract of a talk to be given at the SOAS, London.
> > Presumably, the author vetted his abstract before e-mailing it around
> > the world and saw nothing wrong.
> >
> > Or, he may simply have fucked up.
>
> this is the very same example you posted about here on Sep 11, 2011, at
> 10:59 PM, to which i replied that this was just the extremely common
> "nouning by truncation".
>
> arnold
>
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