(urth) Rudesind / Inire / Lunar Picture

Jeff Wilson jwilson at io.com
Tue Jul 27 06:57:12 PDT 2010


On 7/27/2010 4:01 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
>> Also, "your blue Urth" is ultimately the translator's choice of words,
> not necessarily a literal translation of what Severian recorded. "Your
> [item]" is part of an English idiom that is popular among craftsmen who
> work on other people's property, perhaps like an engineer who has been
> hired to improve an existing potato chip production line, and this has
> become a marketing tool where "your" addresses the audience even if they
> don't own the item yet, and even if the crafter is promoting a recipe or
> abstract idea rather than a service.
>> Googling "your basic" yields 2 million + examples of this modest
> variation, but the idiom is at least decades old; "Your Show of Shows"
> debuted in 1950.
>
> This use of "your" is common in Ireland, and has almost certainly been
> so for generations.. A very common version is "your man" meaning "that
> man", as in "[Do you] see your man over there?".
>
> Other versions use "your" in place of "the", as in "Your frog, now, [ in
> contrast to some previously mentioned creature] is a more amphibious
> type of fellow".


That's fascinating.

In isolation, it may not have been clear that my post refers to the 
idiom being of the English language in contrast to French or whatever 
other language with which Edward Cotton may be more familiar, rather 
than of the English people.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >



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