Trespassers will be trespassed

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Apr 25 20:18:34 UTC 2013


On Apr 25, 2013, at 3:28 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> Perhaps someone concerned with illegal immigration has misunderstood
> "forgive us our trespasses".
>
> DanG

And perhaps others got even more confused and recalled it as "forgive us our violators"

LH
>
>
> On Thu, 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
>>
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
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