So maybe BJ has a point

originally posted by Vincent Fritzsche:

Raspail Ay I thought had barrique and non-barrique bottlings. I want to say the US importer takes or commissions the former, but I'm not sure. I have only the '01 in the cellar and it's outstanding. Aging well.
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That was a beautiful wine. Wish I had some left.

I've never found a trace of barrique on the bottles I get in France.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
I went through a case of 01 Cayron, of which some bottles were startlingly egregious...
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Ian,
I'm not trying to give you a hard time (well, not very much, anyway) but what do you mean by the term "egregious"? Very bad? I'm used to seeing it as an intensifier and not as a stand-alone adjective.

TIA
Mark Lipton
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for what it's worth, usage frequency of "is / was egregious" is twice that of "intensifier" among the 450 million words in the corpus of contemporary american english (coca). a rough eyeball of the contextual data suggests that around half the time "egregious" is used, it is in a way that is consistent with ian's.

given that "egregious" is more than fifty times more frequent than "intensifier," either your intuitions or your sampling have let you down.

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

[...]

I am sympathetic with your original criticism of Ian, though. Calling the wine "egregious" tout court is somewhat vague. Was it egregiously corked? Egregiously concentrated? Egregiously oaked?
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linguistic communication is inherently vague. successful communication requires that the sender construct a message that the receiver can reconstruct, and attention and charity on the part of the receiver during the reconstruction process.

in this context, anyone skilled in contemporary american english can readily infer that ian meant, "egregiously bad," and that some folks need to get out more.

r. slicker
 
originally posted by Cliff:
originally posted by Vincent Fritzsche:

Raspail Ay I thought had barrique and non-barrique bottlings. I want to say the US importer takes or commissions the former, but I'm not sure. I have only the '01 in the cellar and it's outstanding. Aging well.
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That was a beautiful wine. Wish I had some left.

I've never found a trace of barrique on the bottles I get in France.
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I don't find it either. But the Danish website describes the wine as vinified in foudre and finished in barriques and has a picture of the barriques. Again, age is not specified. There are wineries in CdP that use very old barriques and don't get the oak effect. I'm thinking of Banneret in particular.

Raspail Ay has always aged well for me and I still have a few bottles of the 01 and more than a couple of the 98. After this past time, I'll hold a few still longer, though they usually sing just fine around age 10-12 for me.

I'm sure Slicker can justify Howard Cosell's description to O.J. Simpson of his record running back year as meretricious, even without reference to subsequent events.
 
originally posted by richard slicker:

for what it's worth, usage frequency of "is / was egregious" is twice that of "intensifier" among the 450 million words in the corpus of contemporary american english (coca). a rough eyeball of the contextual data suggests that around half the time "egregious" is used, it is in a way that is consistent with ian's.

given that "egregious" is more than fifty times more frequent than "intensifier," either your intuitions or your sampling have let you down.
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It's certainly a good thing, then, that I'm firmly in the prescriptivist camp. I bow to your knowledge of the usage, but it seriously doesn't comport with the way I see it used in print. I guess that I do have to get out more.

Mark Lipton
 
Having eyeballed the first 30 or so examples of "egregious" to appear on COCA, I would also contest Slicker's interpretation of what he saw. When the word is used as an adjective, there is almost always an implication of specified modification. Thus for instance the first example "they have to silence dissent in the most egregious of ways." Using it as a straightforward predicate adjective, as Ian did, in the manner of "the shirt is red," "the wine is egregious," occurs but really in contexts that offer the specification that only Ian's later post offered.
 
Interesting exchange here! I cannot recall ever seeing or hearing "egregious" used other than how Ian intended it. Nor can I recall knowing about its other applications.

As it's a word I often seem to have occasion to use, I'll have to rethink its appropriateness.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

I'm sure Slicker can justify Howard Cosell's description to O.J. Simpson of his record running back year as meretricious, even without reference to subsequent events.
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maybe. maybe not. there's so much about this sentence that defies justification.

the idea of disorderlies eyeballing of coca, otoh, is truly heartwarming.

fb.
 
I eyeballed it, of course, entirely because of you, so you get the credit. And in response to Pete Creasey, I must add that one should read oneself before accepting either my or fb's interpretation of the sentences. There are numbers of them that take the form "x is egregious." I would argue that even in the snippets that appear there, one can readily see whether the meaning is that the mistake is egregiously stupid, that the lie is egregiously bald-faced, etc. One hardly has to accept my interpretation of those sentences, though, and fb is certainly right that the form "x is egregious" occurs at the very least with some frequency. In aligning myself with another professor, though, I was attesting to the fact that, with him, I didn't know what saying "the wine is egregious" meant and found the usage anomalous.
 
originally posted by MLipton:


It's certainly a good thing, then, that I'm firmly in the prescriptivist camp.
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i thought oswaldo was the prescriptivist?

fb.
 
The opposition between prescriptive and descriptive has always seemed to me a false one. All forms of the language developed historically and will continue to do so no matter how many rules we invoke and support. On the other hand, bububu still mostly doesn't mean anything about walks and umbrellas except among a few philosophers with feeble senses of humor, and their days are numbered. The basis for prescription isn't the value of rules but the fact of communication occurring or not and then, of course, some of us have various hidebound personal aesthetic preferences with regard to style. Mob psychology around here is also useful.
 
originally posted by richard slicker:
originally posted by MLipton:


It's certainly a good thing, then, that I'm firmly in the prescriptivist camp.
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i thought oswaldo was the prescriptivist?

fb.
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And, speaking of prescriptivist, YOU were the one who planted the idea of marginal climates in my rule-o-tropic brain. I just took the ball and ran away with it.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On the other hand, bububu still mostly doesn't mean anything about walks and umbrellas except among a few philosophers with feeble senses of humor, and their days are numbered.
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This was very funny. Bravo.

originally posted by richard slicker:
my contribution always was marginal at best.
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I never understood why people would eat oleo.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
T On the other hand, bububu still mostly doesn't mean anything about walks and umbrellas except among a few philosophers with feeble senses of humor, and their days are numbered.
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Clearly not just philosophers
 
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