[Ads-l] "primary", verb: to challenge in a primary election

[Jonathan Lighter]

I first encountered this more than a year ago but paid little attention.

JL

On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 7:42 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> From today's *Daily Kos*, a Philadelphia progressive news web daily:
>
> >>>>>
> *NY Democrats just made history with one of the most progressive policy
> victories in generations*
> *Apr 12, 2021 1:01am Eastern Daylight Time *
> <https://tinyurl.com/4tjmsr2t>
>
> ...
> But the tide has been quietly turning since in 2018, when a band of
> progressives primaried members of the IDC, a group of turncoat former
> Democrats that caucused with and gave a majority to the GOP. The
> progressives won six of eight of those primaries, enabling actual Democrats
> to win back control of the State Senate that fall.
> <<<<<
>
> Incidentally, "six of eight of those primaries" seems excessively analytic,
> in place of the more usual construction "six of those eight primaries".
> True, neither number had been previously mentioned, but this construction
> is open to interpretation as "We [the authors] chose [cherry-picked?] eight
> of the primaries involved, and *six of those eight* were won by the
> progressive challengers."
>
> Mark A. Mandel
> Isn't language change fun?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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

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