[Ads-l] Facebook: "He was _victim blaming_ those affected."

[Laurence Horn]

Good points.  Actually, though, I had originally written "copy-editors engaged in which-hunting", only it got autocorrected to "witch-hunting"; I was thinking of the ones who object to the use of "which" in restrictive relative clauses in the belief that it should invariably be corrected to "that".  Not as elegant as my favorite auto-correction of the past fortnight, viz. the transmigration of "pudendum muliebre" (reproducing the OED-endorsed gloss for...well, you can guess) to "pudendum mulberry".  Gives a whole new understanding to "Here we go round the mulberry bush".

LH

> On Sep 7, 2015, at 6:46 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> 
>> On the other hand, copy-editors engaged in witch-hunting probably are just
>> hunting whiches.
>> 
> 
> Not in *my* dialect! They're hunting *witches*! Sadly, there aren't many of
> us [hw]-speakers left. A barracks-mate from Cincinnata casually observed, a
> propose of nothing, "You know, the H in words that start with wh- isn't
> pronounced," way back in 1960. Had I been a violent man, I'd have punched
> him out for implying that my pronunciation was not correct.
> 
> Well, it wasn't really like that. It was one of those times when some
> random thought pops into your head and you just speak it, there being no
> obvious reason not to.
> 
> I wonder whether it would have made any difference, if the spelling, hw-,
> had been maintained. Probably not. But,
> 
> Youneverknow.
> 
> 
> -- 
> -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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