Timeline for What does this "Change" mean in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Nov 30, 2014 at 16:43 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Mari-Lou: Possibly. But I'd have thought meaning-in-context (where "context" = "Shakespeare", "Dickens", "Victorian English", "medical texts", "bog-snorkelling", what-have-you) should be sufficient "granularity" for usages which aren't "widespread and/or current" and don't easily fit into one of the larger/more general categories such as archaic, dialectal, etc. | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 16:30 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A |
@FumbleFingers Well, the tag is dickens, there are a number of questions related to passages/terms taken from his books. I think he merits a tag all to himself. I had considered, momentarily, 19th-century-english but then thought better of it. The meaning tag is too vast and general IMHO
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| Nov 30, 2014 at 16:24 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Mari-Lou: But as established by my earlier comment, Dickens used it at least 4-5 decades after the "erroneous" usage had already been recorded, so it's not really what most people would consider a "Dickensism" (which would tend to imply a usage either coined or massively popularised by the man). Which might perhaps apply in rare instances, but I don't think Dickens changed the actual language to anything like the extent Shakespeare did (or at least, seems to have, from the current perspective). | |
| Nov 29, 2014 at 15:32 | vote | accept | Nisal Kevin Kotinkaduwa | ||
| Nov 29, 2014 at 14:20 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A |
@FumbleFingers Interesting. Well, I vote for a Dickensism tag. We have one for Shakespeare.
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| Nov 29, 2014 at 14:16 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Mari-Lou: Actually, there's more to it than that. Note this definition 3 for change in the full OED: A place where merchants meet for the transaction of business, an exchange. (Since 1800, erroneously treated as an abbreviation of Exchange, and written 'Change.) Now chiefly in phr. on 'Change, at the Exchange. So it's not a "Dickensism" anyway, and strictly speaking it's not an abbreviation either (or wasn't, until 1800 a few decades before Dickens perpetuated the "erroneous" usage complete with errant apostrophe). | |
| Nov 29, 2014 at 12:49 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | The other clue, of course, being the apostrophe - indicating one or more missing letters in that proper noun. | |
| Nov 29, 2014 at 12:37 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 29, 2014 at 12:51 | |||||
| Nov 29, 2014 at 12:32 | history | answered | Weazer | CC BY-SA 3.0 |