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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: Article
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Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 18:47:16 GMT
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Julian Pardoe wrote:

> I'm fascinated to learn that the possessive is used with inanimate nouns in
> the US.  It's one of the differences between British and American that I've
> never noticed before.  Can you give us some example sentences?

The American news-magazine *Time* popularized this style starting
sometime in the 1920's, writing "Florida's governor" instead of
the historic form "the governor of Florida", probably in an effort
to be bright, breezy, and (above all) brief.  From there it has
spread to other journalistic prose, and is occasionally to be found
even in more elevated styles.

*Time* was well-known for its stylistic oddities, known as Timespeak:
the tendency to make occupations into titles, as in "Writer Hemingway
said that..."; extending the use of participles-as-adjectives to
historically unused verbs ("the balding poet"), and VS inversion,
once parodied as "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind."

There is a bit of parody-Timespeak in Isaac Asimov's novel *Foundation
and Empire* ("balding, blaspheming, Leftish intellectual Ebling Mis",
IIRC).

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
