Bob, at 19:24 on Jun 15 1995, you wrote to Bill Grimsley...

BG> FWIW, it seems that the most confusing words, or at least those with the 
BG> greatest number of separate meanings, have their roots in French... 

BL> That's an interesting thought! I've never noticed, 

Probably something to do with their weird spelling conventions, diphthongs,
dropped accent characters, and the like.  Once you start thumbing through
the dictionary, it becomes increasingly obvious.

BL> but it would make sense - the way English steals so many foreign words.

Yeah, we certainly have fuck-all of our own.  Most appear to come from
Latin, French and German, with a smattering of Greek thrown in for good
measure.

BL> English has a poetic bent.

Nah, just plain fucking bent will do.

BL> It likes to take words like "brilliant" and stretch the
meanings (bright 
BL> light to intelligence). The poetic meaning usually ends up the dominant 
BL> one. 

What, you mean like "prosaic" ??  :)

BL> We Australians are the worst of all - looking for opposite meanings to get 
BL> a laugh with irony. We even use "brilliant" to mean the
exact opposite.

True, our SsOH are far more highly developed than the yanks, that's for sure.

BTW, did you hear about the elderly Jew who walked into a stone mason's
shop, and asked him to build a 60' tall statue of Adolf Hitler?  When asked
why, the Jew said "Cos I've just won 1st division in Gold Lotto".
 "So why the fuck would you want a statue of Hitler then?", asked
the mason.  The Jew rolled up his sleeve, and said "See?  Because he
gave me the winning numbers, that's why."   Oh well, at least I liked
it.  |-)

Regards, Bill
@EOT:

--- Msgedsq 3.10 alpha 2