[Ads-l] When Snow Sticks

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Settle" sounds familiar but literary. "Land" sounds crazy, "lay" weird
"pitch" impossible.

I can't even believe our Hoosier friends of 1895 could feel the need to
enclose "sticks" in quotation marks!

Seriously, I may have learned this meaning of "stick" even before the more
common one - age ca 2.

JL

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 4:09 AM, Michael Quinion <
michael.quinion at worldwidewords.org> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Michael Quinion <michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG>
> Organization: World Wide Words
> Subject:      Re: When Snow Sticks
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> > It's so obvious that I *didn't* recognize it immediately, thinking
> > that, surely, it must be some kind of trick question. What do
> > English-speakers outside of The World use to specify that phenomenon -
> > or should that be "phenomena"? - I wonder.
>
> My experience in Britain, from where the original questioner comes, is
> that the usual terms are "settling", less often "laying". But, as he
> pointed out, "pitching", "landing" and others are in dialect use in
> various places. "Sticking" is used but it wouldn't come first to my mind.
>
> --
> Michael Quinion
> World Wide Words
> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
>
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