guy = 'thing'
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 1 08:18:34 UTC 2014
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
> Common for a long time in ref. to material objects.
It was hip in the MIT linguistics dept. in the late '70's, even in
reference to abstract objects, like the parts of speech: "it's clearly the
case that this guy is ungrammatical in the relevant environment." WTF?! :-(
It annoyed the hell out of me, especially when the foreign - uh, I mean
*international* - students picked it up. There wasn't anything that I could
do about it, of course, voice crying in the desert and all that.
--
-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