"fighter plane" again

[Jonathan Lighter]

Honestly, I wasn't searching for this:

2007 Harriet Hyman Alonso _Robert E. Sherwood_ (Amherst: U. of Mass. Press)
285: Eventually, Fred finds work with a company that turns scrap metal from
jet fighter planes into prefab housing.

The reference, of course, is to the same scene in the same 1946 movie with
the same B-17 as in my last communique'.

Professor Alonso "is professor of history at the City College of New York,
CUNY, where she currently serves as chair of the Department of
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Center for Worker Education."

For those who hope this was just a trivial slip, I refer skeptics to my
post of a few years ago noting that Fox News confidently referred to a
British flyover of WW2 bombers as "fighter jets." That occurred in 2002.

Few nonspecialists, of course, have any occasion to speak of antique
aircraft, so what the hell? But it's much like routinely calling diarrhea
"the flu" and a bacterium (or, I suppose, any illness) a "virus."

Is simple ...er, unawareness...ever a lexical issue?  Don't answer that.

BTW, a rebuilt 1920s biplane flew over my house a couple of weeks ago. My
twenty-something neighbor referred to it as a "bi-wing," which at least is
in the ballpark.


JL


On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 3:31 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "fighter plane" again
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > 2013 Martin Halliwell _Therapeutic Revolutions_ 34 [Rutgers U.P.] : Fred
> > sees a decommissioned fighter plane stripped of engines and propellers;
> he
> > decides to enter the cockpit, but this only brings back vivid memories of
> > his bombing experience.
> >
>
> Is "pursuit plane" still - if it ever was - used in Britspe, or what?
>
>
> --
> -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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