I was hanging out at Languagehat (here) today and decided to throw caution to the wind. Posting a comment made for some nervousness, akin to that of having all 20 tomes of the OED (plus updates) hanging Damocles-iastically above.
The erudite LH has come up with one popular blog (e.g. 138 comments, so far, on the post in question) on an esoteric subject. And for some, including myself, it can be great fun. But user beware, it can get prickly and one can get run over like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. These linguists can be merciless. So, at my own peril, enter I did… (Keeping a bullet handy in my use of “by” instead of “for” in my introductory “Running the risk that I end up being lambasted by my amateurship…”.)
The discussion was on the usage of “either” in English, ad how in Brit it means “each of two” and in American “one of two”—both definitions are of course valid, but the question was on usage. And there I went, armed with I-don’t-know-what.
The full thread is below (and here), and I will update it as it comes along. But I felt the initial upper-cut (let alone my newfound RAE-stemmed para[e]noia) at: “You seem at least to have mastered the style of the Sphinx. I find it very difficult to make out what you’re saying, from sentence to sentence. Each sentence is shrink-wrapped so indestructibly and tightly around its meaning that I can’t prise it open – like the plastic wrapping around small electronic equipment nowadays, in Germany at any rate.”
So much so that in yet another confessional, I replied that he’d “just given brilliant wordsmith ammunition to every significant other that, in looking for signifiance if my insignificant prose that was meant to convey my heart-felt but locked-in significatum, decided I was too obscure… and dumped me.”
Being the sucker that I am for punishment (which the above quote embodies), here goes the thread… Continue reading ‘One can of lexicographical whoop-ass (intra-update)’
