Trespassers will be trespassed

[Laurence Horn]

On Apr 25, 2013, at 12:17 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:

> There's a new meaning for "trespass" going around that I haven't found
> in the OED or in my unabridged Random House dictionary, or Wordnik or
> even a dictionary of legal terms. In expressions like "Violators will be
> trespassed,"

as a reconstruction?  That is…

"Trespassers will be violated".   No, that can't be right.  Ah, "Violators will be trespassed."  Much better.  Or at least more humane.

LH

> or "He was trespassed from the establishment for two
> years," it means "banned". I've written a piece about it at Visual
> Thesaurus:
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/trespassers-will-be-trespassed/.
> It's behind a paywall, but here are some of the links I included:
>
> - a discussion on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange:
> http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71933/the-use-of-trespasses
> - Google Books view of a book on "loss prevention" that has a thicket of
> examples of this usage of "trespass":
> http://books.google.com/books?id=BNaDkkw6qVQC&q=trespassed
> - Mark  Davies' latest corpus, which showed that this usage is common in
> New Zealand: http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/
>
> Neal
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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