3750e269
From: b.scott@csuohio.edu
On Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:22:53 -0700 (PDT), Helen Hall
wrote in
in rec.arts.sf.misc:
> On Sep 25, 4:38 am, "Brian M. Scott" wrote:
[...]
[]
>> In U.S. English the word retains its original sense, and the
>> specialized sense that you have in mind is just a very
>> commonly used special case. The OED gives the same
>> impression, but that entry is now pretty old, and I see that
>> the current Concise Oxford has only the specialized meaning.
>> This is apparently a relatively recent change, say in the
>> last century or so, in British English.
>> Can you really not say 'We went through the slush pile and
>> culled out enough good stories for an anthology'?
> No, you can't. In UK English the meaning would be totally
> the opposite. You could use it metaphorically of stories
> or books on a shelf, but what you would be "culling"
> would be the ones that you were rejecting or disposing
> of, not the ones you were keeping. Though the older
> meaning may still be in the dictionary, "cull" in UK
> English as she is spoke and used in newspapers and in the
> media means only "reduce the numbers of by killing".
Fascinating; that's a change of which I was completely
unaware.
That's certainly one common meaning here, especially in
connection with Bambi infestations, but it's by no means the
only one. I think that the word is probably most often used
nowadays in connection with weeding out unwanted items, and
that usages like my example above are getting rarer, but it
definitely doesn't yet automatically imply weeding out by
killing, and it can definitely be applied to collections of
inanimate objects.
[...]
Brian
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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