Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 19 February 2011

How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct?

issue 19 February 2011

How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the enemy as ‘squares’ to say something like, ‘I am just one cat in a world of cool cats,’ as Norman Mailer did in 1957.

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