Re: "Wife"
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, May 29, 2003, 16:39 |
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On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 12:22:26PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Well, m-w.com, which is definitely a dictionary of American English,
> lists both senses, and indeed gives the "body of water confined by a wall"
> sense first = oldest (as the documentation for this dictionary says).
> So it's current American English that's innovative here, for once.
> Evidently the generalization has gone the other way.
In that same source I note that the first entry for "dam" is the meaning
"female parent". I guess they're ordered chronologically (13th vs
14th centuries); the water wall sense is more common in my experience.
> Similarly, the word "ditch" in AmE has come to signify a trench
> (originally it was a Saxon doublet of Norse "dike"), but not so in
> Hiberno-English.
So in the Emerald Isle, "ditch" still means "dike"?
-Mark
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