Trespassers will be trespassed

Neal Whitman nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET
Thu Apr 25 21:06:55 UTC 2013


Actually, that was my first suspicion, but I don't think it's correct.

Neal

On Apr 25, 2013, at 3:21 PM, 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:      Re: Trespassers will be trespassed
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list