[Ads-l] YouTubery

[Jonathan Lighter]

Back around 1983 or '84, I drove even a few graduate students crazy by
asking them to fill in the blank with a relative pronoun:

"An idea -------- time has come."

 In descending order, the responses were "who's," "whose," "thats,"
"that's," "which's," "whiches."

Some freshmen couldn't come up with anything.

JL




On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 12:32 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> At some point we'll be posting a phenomenon page on "that(')s" on the Yale
> Grammatical Diversity Project web site (ygdp.yale.edu); the draft is done
> but we kind of stopped working on everything over the summer.  Turns out
> there are a lot of variables for when it's more likely to turn up, although
> from what I remember from the relevant surveys, geography isn't one of
> them; mostly it has to do with animacy and syntactic frame.
>
> LH
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 9:15 PM Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "... an art exhibition _that's_ theme was violence ..."
> >
> > --
> > - 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
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 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