[Ads-l] Heard on Forensic Files

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've encountered this, but not in decades.

And definitely in white usage.

JL

On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> The victim's father, a middle-aged white man, laments:
>
> "I just can't _feature_ a police officer doing something like this!"
>
> This use of _feature_ is "standard" in BE. But, not unexpectedly, I've
> never heard it so used by a white person, before.
>
> DARE has a 1934 quote from AmSp in which "a teacher" hopes that expressions
> such as "Can you feature that?" will not catch on, if you can feature that.
> Apparently, that hope was forlorn.
>
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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