[Ads-l] "substitute" woes

[Jonathan Lighter]

> It’s a confusing bit of phraseology,

...if you're illiterate.

JL

On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Sep 17, 2016, at 12:31 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> It’s a confusing bit of phraseology
> >
> >
> > Way off topic, but isn't this the way that it normally works in German?
>
> Not sure which verb you're thinking of, but since an "ersatz" X is a
> substitute or replacement for X (in English as well as German), I assume
> "ersetzen" would be the verb in question.  But that begs the question (I
> think I'm using that in the "correct" way), since "ersetzen" gets
> translated as 'replace' rather than 'substitute', so if you're ersetz-ing Y
> for (durch) X, you're replacing Y with X or substituting X for Y.  German
> speakers, can you confirm?  (Chris?)
>
> LH
>
> P.S.  Of course if you're an innovative "substitute" speaker--which if
> you're Wilson you're not--then you could gloss "ersetzen" as 'substitute'
>
> > My
> > opinion of German being akin to that of Mark Twain, I don't have any
> German
> > books handy in which to look for examples, needless to say. Having
> > something available from which to draw an example - "That would be too
> much
> > like right," as we say in East Texas.
> > --
> > -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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