[Ads-l] Heard on Forensic files:

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

> On Feb 7, 2018, at 7:22 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 7, 2018, at 12:10 AM, Dave Hause <dwhause at CABLEMO.NET> wrote:
>> 
>> Well, maybe they wouldn't know "supine" but they'd know it ISN"T prone.
> 
> I’m not sure.  I learned marksmanship in summer camp at 8 or 9, and I did indeed learn prone at that point, but I’m not sure I would have deduced that lying on my back, with or without a rifle in my hands, wouldn’t have *also* been called prone.  For all I knew, “prone” meant lying down.   I’m sure it was several years after learning “prone” that I learned that supine wasn’t.

my experience as well.  i learned the 'lying flat on one's belly' sense in marksmanship classes as a kid, though i also knew the word as an everyday word for 'lying fat'.  i just assumed that the riflery use was a specialization in a technical context, and that still seems to me like a reasonable account of the word's usage.  after all, contextually specialized senses are extremely common.

so i think that NOAD's version --

   2 lying flat, especially face downward

is pretty good, though i might have preferred a division into two subentries here:

  lying flat

  [in marksmanship] lying face downward

meanwhile, in my postings on body positions for the receptive partner in sexual intercourse (vaginal or anal), i've used Latin-derived technical terms throughout, including "supine" and "prone", though there are widely used non-technical expressions here: "missionary" for the first, "doggie" for the second (though these are insertive-focused rather than receptive-focused).

arnold


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