to rape

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Apr 23 05:01:57 UTC 2014


On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:35 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> there are several words for rape in German


And in English, too. Back in the day in the newspapers of StL, one word
commonly used was _assault_, as in,

"In her complaint, the alleged victim claimed to have suffered an assault
at the hands of a male assailant."

One may ask how one could be certain that the reference was not to, say,
wife-beating. Well, that was not considered to be a reportable crime,
unless he got so heavy into it that she died.

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



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