[Ads-l] "Prolific" = 'important, influential'?

[Mark Mandel]

Yuchhh.

MAM

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 10:10 AM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> From an obit for Harold Bloom in this morning’s Yale Daily News,
> https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/10/15/harold-bloom-dies-at-89/
>
> ==========
> Over his lifetime, Bloom amassed several honors and awards — including a
> MacArthur Genius Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Award — and
> edited hundreds of anthologies. Some of his more prolific books include
> “The Anxiety of Influence,” “The American Religion” and “How to Read and
> Why,” all of which have been translated into languages across the globe.
> ==========
>
> Maybe just a malapropism rather than a SOTA, you ask? Google hits
> retrieved for “prolific book” are all reasonable:
>
> Prolific book critic (which of course Bloom was)
> Prolific book reviewer
> Prolific book publisher
> Prolific book collector
> Prolific book illustrator
> Prolific book thief
>
> But then I tried “prolific books”, and sure enough, the first page of hits
> includes
>
> The year has seen the release of some soon-to-be-prolific books that are
> bound to help navigate us through our socio-political climates
> Of course, there have always been writers working to dismantle racism (the
> prolific books of James Baldwin and Angela Davis come to mind)
> one of the most prolific books on this list
> Such prolific books as Gulliver's Travels and Tom Jones
> People like Lloyd Alexander wrote great, prolific books, over a long
> period of time, and all because they were short.
>
>
> Where “prolific” seems to mean ‘wordy’, ’widely read/sold’,
> ‘important/famous’, or 'written by a prolific author’.
>
> Not in OED, needless to say.
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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