[Ads-l] grieve, trans.

[Neal Whitman]

Thank you for shopping K-Mart.

Neal

On 1/27/2015 6:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: grieve, trans.
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>
> Most notorious? "I graduated college."
>
> In editorial and professorial circles and among their hangers-on, that used
> to mark you as an illiterate, even if you graduated Harvard with a four-oh.
>
> JL
>
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 4:52 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: grieve, trans.
>>
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>>> On Jan 23, 2015, at 6:38 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> =
>> wrote:
>>> =20
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>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>>> Subject:      grieve, trans.
>>> =
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>>> =20
>>> OED (8b) has 'To feel or show grief at or for; to regret deeply. =
>> _poet_.'
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>>> The cites from 1597 to 1871 are drawn principally from verse.
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>>> Time to add "8c  To grieve for; mourn."
>>> =20
>>> The script of this week's _Sleepy Hollow_ employed this usage twice. =
>> IIRC,
>>> one expression was "He's grieving his wife and daughter."
>> this is an instance of what i've called "transitivizing P-drop", and you =
>> can find lots of examples, though i'm not sure how long they've been =
>> around.  in any case, plenty of instances of "grieving his wife" =
>> 'grieving for his wife' -- in addition to "grieving his wife's death" =
>> and "grieving the loss of his wife".
>>
>> i see from my notes that transitive "mourn" 'mourn for' was criticized =
>> by some 19th-century usage writers, though it seems to have been a =
>> standard variant for a long time (as it is now).
>>
>> arnold
>>
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-- 
Dr. Neal Whitman
Lecturer, ESL Composition
School of Teaching and Learning
College of Education and Human Ecology
Arps Hall
1945 North High Street
whitman.11 at osu.edu
(614) 260-1622


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