From: "Thomas, Graeme" <thogr04@mail.cai.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 10:57:24 -0400
Subject: RE: SOWPODS as a METAPHOR
Message-id: <9709291455.AA08708@cai.com>
Dan Pratt wrote:
We're talking about several different words all of which happen to be spelled DA.I acknowledge the point, but at this level of discussion there's not much difference between "a word with several meanings" and "several words which happen to be spelled the same".
And not by the wildest stretch of my imagination would I characterize a word omitted by all North American, Australian, and British mainstream college-type dictionaries as "fairly common".I confess to being surprised by your assertion that DA is omitted from all Australian and British collegiate dictionaries. The word is in common use in Irish prose (and by that I mean prose written by English-speaking people of Irish extraction), as it is the word of choice to describe one's father in such circumstances.
Far more typical is the following vignette.[ tale of dislike of AE snipped ]
Some years ago I was adjudicating in a charity schoolchildren's tournament. Each pair of children had a supervising adult, whose job was to maintain order, and to do the first-level adjudication. The "experts" task was to provide authoritative answers where the adults were unsure, and, where possible, to overrule the adults where they had disallowed something valid.
One child managed to play HUG, and had it disallowed by the adult. I was standing nearby, and attempted to overrule. She exclaimed "But it's slang!" I pointed out that it was not, and that anyway slang was perfectly acceptable. She was not convinced, and claimed that it should still be disallowed on the grounds that it was American. I again pointed out her objection was false, and that anyway it would have made no difference. (The two children were particularly amused by my offer to demonstrate, but for some reason the lady declined.)
So, should we be led by particular whims? If so, then HUG should be removed instantly.
he was really quite annoyed to have been invited to a game of English Scrabble only to find himself expected to embrace Scottish words.Had he been expected to embrace Gaelic words, then he might have had a legitimate grievance, but Scots is just a dialect of English.
It's simply human nature to react in this manner when playing word games in one's native language,There are many people, like this player who disliked Scots, and the player who thought that HUGging was a nasty American practice best not seen in decent company, who react strongly to the revelation that English is a large language, with many dialects. Further, anyone not a specialist is very likely to encounter thousands of words in the dictionary which are never encountered in normal life. The crucial point is that different groups of people have widely differing views on what should be allowed into the core of the language.
Graeme