given

W Brewer brewerwa at GMAIL.COM
Fri Mar 15 04:41:50 UTC 2013


JL wrote: <<< weird recent use of "given" . . . transmission appears low,
given small number of confirmed cases>>>
WB: Reminds me of the old Latin ablative absolute. Seems to me that _given_
is a calque of Latin datum or data, the _givens_ for an algebra problem.
I.e. our data consists of the following, just a small number of cases. This
is what we are given; try to figure it out only from what we have been
given.

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list