ILL, the verb

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jan 27 07:05:59 UTC 2013


On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 11:52 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> and in fact it expands to mean the opposite of what it stands for, I'm guessing:  ILL = "Inter-Library Loan", but here meaning "Borrow via an ILL request"

As a vetean of some twenty sucking years in the field of ILL, I can
tell you - but not document, of course - that _ILL_ - pronounced "I
yell ell" - as a verb with the meaning cited above, has probably
existed since two days after the introduction of ILL, some time after
the destruction of the Library of Alexandria or thereabouts. It's,
like, totally expected that such would be the case.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list