Re: A Question on Integrety

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_golden.net> wrote in message news:OdSdnW_4s9qxa3yiRVn-jw_at_golden.net...

> Good try, but you have to show a little more care in these situations.
> Dialog is actually both a transitive and an intransitive verb, and Dawn
used
> it as an intransitive verb.

Oh I am pretty sure that if Dawn knew that "dialogue" has a history as a verb going back to the middle of the 17th Century she would have spelt it that way. But even that verb form seems to not to occur in literate written English after the middle of the 19th Century, and you certainly won't find it in the Concise Oxford English dictionary at all. No, "dialog" as a verb is a lazy and illiterate neologism. I won't attribute to erudition and education that which can adequately be explained by not knowing any better.

I will concede that if it is a verb at all, Dawn used it as an intransitive verb (in my eagerness I didn't pay attention to the "with"). I struggle to think how it could be used as a transitive verb in fact. You seem confident that it can. Care to illustrate that, for our enjoyment? Extra points will be awarded for an actual, roughly contemporary quote, with attribution, that uses the transitive verb.

Roy Hann Received on Fri Dec 19 2003 - 10:23:43 CET