Subject: Re: Swear by my [s]word
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 08:32:26 EST
On Mon, Jan 24, 2000 at 09:12:40AM +0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> '... Loan is still not a verb ...'
>
> I WOULD have quoted my Shorter Oxford Dictionary:
> '... LOAN v. Now mainly U.S. M.E. [...] trans. To grant
> the loan of; to lend ...'
> - except that I have no wish to be mistaken
> for an American.
Fowler's says it best, with a certain amount of disdain:
Loan: The verb, formerly current, was expelled from
idiomatic English by *lend*. But it survived in
the U.S., and has now returned to provide us with
a NEEDLESS VARIANT.
Then Fowler's entry on "needless variant" is scathing enough to have
been written by Scottie himself (and I say this with a modicum of
affection and admiration). It starts:
Needless variants: Though it savours of presumption
for any individual to label words needless, it is
certain that words deserving the label exist; the
question is which they are, and who is the
censor that shall disenfranchise them. Every
dictionary-maker would be grateful to an Academy
that should draw up an index expurgatorius and
relieve him of the task of record rubbish.
I love Fowler's. I really do. This is from the second edition (Oxford,
1965). The 1927 is a bit long of tooth and the new edition is said to
be so loose enough to accommodate virtually anything. I have not yet
bought a copy.
> Boy. A nation of lawyers. You can say that again. And
> you'd better get the words right or we'll have another
> fortnight defining exactly what you mean by 'A' & 'of'.
In this instance, I think I'll duck that charge and plead that I am
offering sheer amusement.
> The play is, of course, about the folly of letting the law
> decide human affairs.
Which (and then I'll exit) brings me to the entry on irony, since it was
recently a topic, and I wanted to comment on it but was hindered by a
lack of hours in the day. I think it might apply here in a vaguely
amusing way:
Irony: Irony is a form of utterance that postulates
a double audience, consisting of one party that
hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and
another party that, when more is meant than meets
the ear, is aware both of that more and of the
outsider's incomprehension.
>From Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd ed., again.
--tim
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