[Ads-l] "bully pulpit"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Jan 19 01:31:55 UTC 2017


On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:
On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:13 PM, <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:

> my intuition is that nobody who was born after about 1899 says "bully" in
> the sense 'great' or 'powerful'
>

Back in the day, it was used in parodies of Britspeak.

The Texaco Star Theater:

Some bloke: "Bully, bully! Tally-ho! Pip,pip! And all that sort of rot!"

Milton Berle: "Excuse me. Are you British?"

Some bloke: "If I were any more British, I couldn't talk a *tall*!"


Nevertheless, as most Murricuns do, it has been my custom to interpret
"bully pulpit" as a noun-noun construction whose exact meaning is of no
interest to me.
-- 
-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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