"migrate", v.tr., a sort-of untracked sense

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri May 11 18:02:35 UTC 2012


On May 11, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> To me an account is a form of data, and has been so since the development
> of ledger books.

OK; I guess I don't tend to think of an e-mail account as data, although I think of the messages it makes available to me as data.  My imagination is limited, I'm willing to concede.
>
> As for divestee, your account was divested, ie, sold, by your original
> bank, the divester. By my thinking, your account was a divestee.

That would make sense to me, except for the general constraint on -ee nominals that restricts them to animates and indeed humans.  This constraint is sometimes overridden, but it's fairly robust.  But in any case I myself, and not my account, was described as a divestee.

LH
>
>
> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      "migrate", v.tr., a sort-of untracked sense
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I just received a notice that my e-mail account is about to be deleted, =
>> and while I first took this to be one of the many many spam warnings I =
>> regularly receive along these lines, I realized this was an actual one, =
>> but no need to panic, because my account, as they reminded me, "has been =
>> migrated" to a different sort of account as part of a mass migration =
>> event of this kind that we're undergoing.  I checked the OED entry for =
>> transitive "migrate", underlying such a plural, and the closest was=20
>>
>> 7. Computing.
>> a. trans. To transfer (data, programs, etc.) from one environment to =
>> another.
>>
>> Neither the definition nor the cites include the possibility of an =
>> account being migrated, although it might be taken to fall under this =
>> definition.  Becoming a migrant in this way reminded me of an event =
>> several years ago when a bank merger (Fleet, formerly BankBoston, being =
>> swallowed up by Bank of America) resulted in a randomly selected subset =
>> of account holders being notified that our accounts were being =
>> "divested" and would be transferred to another, unrelated bank.  =
>> (Apparently B of A couldn't take in all of the suddenly unbanked =
>> multitudes because this would have violated one of the few anti-monopoly =
>> laws affecting the banking industry.)  We received notices in which we =
>> were referred to as "divestees", a word for which there is no entry in =
>> the OED and which doesn't follow by principles of semi-productive =
>> morphology from any of the listed meanings of transitive "divest"--e.g.
>> 5.  Econ. To sell off (a subsidiary company); to dispose of, cease to =
>> hold (an investment).
>>
>> --which would seem to predict that the bank rather than the individual =
>> account holder would be the divestee in this case.=20
>>
>> LH =20=
>>
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>
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