Trespassers will be trespassed

[Dan Goodman]

"No parking.  Violators will be towed.  So will their cars."

On 04/25/2013 03:18 PM, Laurence Horn 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/


--
Dan Goodman
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.

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