[Ads-l] words connected to a single provenance

ADSGarson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Tue Aug 28 20:10:31 UTC 2018


Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA): this word was in use before James Watson
and Francis Crick published their landmark article, but the meaning of
DNA shifted dramatically when the molecule was identified as the
storage and transmission molecule for heredity. A wider circle of
credit for the scientific discovery would include Rosalind Franklin
and Raymond Gosling.

Garson
On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 5:20 AM GEOFFREY NUNBERG <nunbergg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I’ve been trying to come up with words in more-or-less general use that are associated with a single prominent historical or literary provenance — not hapax legomena, but items like “infamy,” which for most people who know it brings FDR’s Pearl Harbor speech to mind but which is used in other contexts as well.
>
> Geoff
>
> Geoffrey Nunberg
> School of Information,
> University of California, Berkeley
> Berkeley, CA 94720-4600
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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