Erm… All hail the New York Times then, eh? I’d best hide my collection of “-our” nouns before the NYT secret police beat my door down. Personally, I’m sure the Duluth Bee isn’t too concerned about what the NYT “fucks up on a daily basis”. I won’t even mention the Sydney Morning Herald, or any other of the world’s newspapers that have the nerve to be published outside of New York city, eh?
Sheesh. The Hobart Mercury publishes a style manual.
OK, any dictionary site on the web indicates that summons is a verb. But, that wasn’t enough for “TheLoadedDog”, because, hey, dictionaries just report what we use and that’s why “sox” and nonsense words are in there.
So, to indicate that no, it’s not just modern mis-usage that has put summons in the dictionary, I provide cites of New York Time articles from 1928 (and by searching the archives there you can find articles from 1860 that use it).
So, now, we want to disparage the New York Times and its editorial board.
So, right now, just say it.
Just say, “I have chosen to remain ignorant and obstinate in the face of evidence to the contrary. I do not wish to have my ignorance fought because then I would have to admit I made a careless mistake. There is nothing short of God coming down from Heaven and telling me that he invented the word ‘summons’ on the fifth day that will convince me that it’s a verb.”
Settle down. I told you I didn’t disagree with you, but you’d be better off, maybe, quoting from the NYT style manual than a headline. Headlines are written to get potentially lengthy messages across in as few words and as little space as possible, and they’re not generally considered paragons of grammatical integrity. And for what it’s worth, I find grammatical and typing errors in the NYT every day, so they’re not infallible.
The Grey Lady was brought up to simply to illustrate that the word had not made it’s way into the dictionary because of overwhelming mis-usage.
The fact that some newspapers, or even the New York Times itself, can make typographical errors has no bearing on the point. They haven’t been using “summons” as a verb for 150 years because sometimes they make typos. Bringing it up just indicates an incomprehensible defensiveness about the issue.
Um, defensiveness?
<rereads Trunk’s posts>
<rereads McNew’s posts>
Yeah. Ok. :rolleyes:
I’ll bail out now. You can continue to bluster if you like.
My TAX REFUND = "student loan payment’.
Dammit.