[Ads-l] dear John letter

[Wilson Gray]

> anecdotal

A *feature*, not a bug. ;-)

> elderly

Anecdotally speaking, I've seen _elderly_ defined as, "the age of the
speaker plus ten years."

On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: dear John letter
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And then there were those scary letters you got from your girlfriend =
> that began "Greetings!"
>
> LH
> =20
>
> On Nov 15, 2014, at 8:10 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > Not familiar to me either.
> >=20
> > Was his name "John"?
> >=20
> > JL
> >=20
> > On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 12:47 AM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> =
> wrote:
> >=20
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject:      dear John letter
> >>=20
> >> =
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------=
> -----
> >>=20
> >> This will have to be anecdotal since I didn't save the issue of the
> >> newspaper I read it in.  Sometime last week, our local eight-page rag =
> had
> >> an article on an elderly--older than me--local resident and his =
> military
> >> service in WWII.  The article noted that he was going to enlist =
> before
> >> Pearl Harbor, but then he got his "Dear John" letter directing him to
> >> report for military service.  I haven't seen it used in this sense.  =
> I did
> >> a Google search and didn't find any instances there either.
> >>=20
> >> Herb
> >>=20
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------
> >> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >>=20
> >=20
> >=20
> >=20
> > --=20
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the =
> truth."
> >=20
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-- 
-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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