late = 'died long ago' (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Abuzz with parties" suggests to me that this "very late" is meant
humorously.

Fifty per cent of any current journalistic account is meant to be amusing.

I just made up that figure, but it can't be far off.

JL

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 12:07 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: late = 'died long ago' (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's also possible to pick up a few instances of "the very late Mr.",
> although Google's estimate of how many is more than usually misleading. The
> "About 1,880,000 results" turns out on closer examination to amount to
> exactly 15 instances.  There are a couple of references to the very late
> Mr. Shakespeare, and this one of local interest:
>
> Oct 20, 2010 – New Haven has been abuzz with parties honoring the very
> late Mr. Charles Darwin.
>
> But if 15 can count as about 1,888,000, I don't see why a man dead for 128
> years can't count as (very) late.
>
> LH
>
> On Jan 22, 2013, at 6:53 PM, Tyler Schnoebelen wrote:
>
> > Google Ngrams might be one way to look at how "The Late" has been used.
> (For
> > example, "The Late Mr" is a reasonable search term for exploring:
> >
> http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+late+mr&year_start=1600&yea
> > r_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=).
> >
> > Having suggested this as a data source for examining how "late" has
> changed
> > over time, I will stop far short and just note a couple favorite items:
> >
> > - Back in the late 1700s, it seems like a common use of "The late Mr." to
> > talk about marriages (if the bride's father was dead, for example) or
> estate
> > sales.
> >
> > - Fielding published "The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan
> Wild
> > the Great" in 1743-Jonathan Wild had died in 1725. Wikipedia suggests
> that
> > Fielding was working on this before 1741, though.
> >
> > - "The Theological and Philological Works of the Late Mr. John Toland.
> Being
> > a System of Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity" was originally
> > published in 1732. Toland died in 1722.
> >
> http://books.google.com/books?id=d1Fl7tDqIUwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&
> > q&f=false
> >
> > Tyler
>
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