Auk's dimber tip to all flash coves

Jenny Blackford · 26 Jul 2009, 23:28 · from 2009-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jennyblackford at bigpond.com (Jenny Blackford)
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:28:08 +1000
Subject: (urth) Auk's dimber tip to all flash coves
References: <cbf55b100907090958g76c30a74wc96e9961cea9f66a at mail.gmail.com><44fb53d10907092123s5cc08821y5d88fe9e22031f17 at mail.gmail.com><cbf55b100907100516i520f2ceej7fd4d3d29ae0010a at mail.gmail.com><44fb53d10907101630y29f084f2j44d44fc0a77c58f9 at mail.gmail.com><cbf55b100907101953r25b14411me72992aa10875490 at mail.gmail.com><4A5A5ADD.3090003 at hyraxes.com><cbf55b100907190043nf13f393ye32bb326f7909db0 at mail.gmail.com><001e01ca08ab$b48f4b00$61d04a0c@rclackey>
	<cbf55b100907251207g208d34c1u6a2a48e21ff416a6 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <DBA4204738784815A30E6673E1A7FAA6@jennybdzkrrqrs>

A note from an Australian lurker (and Wolfe reviewer now and then):

The word "mews" isn't obscure in British English, though it's not
often used in Australia. It's used quite commonly as an architectural
description in British novels even now, and presumably also in speech. I 
remember not knowing exactly it meant, as a kid reading Agatha Christie, but 
assuming it was a form of housing and not bothering to check the
dictionary.

The word "cove" is now pretty much obsolete in Australian English, but still
used by old people. My father will still refer to men as "coves", as in
"some silly old cove down at the golf club". The word "flash" was in common 
use
when I was at school as an alternative to "flashy", as in "that's a flash
car", and is still understood. I don't know whether kids use it.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gwern Branwen" <gwern0 at gmail.com>
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2009 5:07 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) Auk's dimber tip to all flash coves

> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Roy C. Lackey<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>> As Dave said, "mews" and "limer" are just obscure words.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net