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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Horses (was: Etruscans)
In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Fri, 15 Nov 1996 22:26:29 GMT
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In article <328CEE15.5C46@ccil.org> John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> writes:

>Believe me, it gets better.  The two species in question are *Equus asinus*,
>the true ass, and *Equus hemionus*, the onager, or Asiatic half-ass.

Or as we parodied a Russian opera when we were children *,

	Eugene the Onager, the Wild Ass of Arabia

>ObSciLang:  For mystified non-North-Americans, the words "ass" and "arse"
>(buttocks) are homophonous in the U.S. and Canada, and are normally spelled
>the same way, namely "ass".

Not quite.  There are people in this country who know and use the word "arse"
(and many Americans think that this is a development rather than a retention).

The use of the word "ass" for "arse" is an example of dysphemism, in which the
euphemism has come to have the associations of the original, in this so com-
pletely that many native speakers are unaware of the existence of the older
term.

*Children of an opera singer/director/professor--forgive us our light moments.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
