for your collection of inverse "substitute" examples...

[Herb Stahlke]

Larry's example makes me wonder whether this construction has been
considered judicially in Words and Phrases.

Herb


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:50 PM, hw gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       hw gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: for your collection of inverse "substitute" examples...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu
> >wrote:
>
> > But few examples I've seen are as unambiguously "substitute OLD for NEW"
> > (and thus predictably weird for those of you who share my old-fogeyspeak
> > dialect).
> >
> > LH
> >
>
> "Predictably weird" is too mild a term! Doesn't German do something like
> this? I have a vague memory of having my mind boggled by such a
> construction. Do you know Harry Bockner? He told me of having had a similar
> problem as he was writing his thesis. He interpreted such a sentence,
> likewise in German, as saying that what he'd always thought to be X > Y
> was, in fact, Y > X. Fortunately, he was wise enough to check it in a
> dictionary.
>
> IAC, the ongoing shift to this odd (re)construction passeth my
> understanding.
>
>
> --
> -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
>
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