Subject: Re: status of ka (was Re: [lojban] x3 of du'

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 09:16:24 -0700

On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 10:03:53PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Nick NICHOLAS scripsit:
> 
> > I think lambda calculus is the bomb, and wonderful, and it would
> > be great to use it in the metalanguage of Lojban. 
> 
> English dialect alert (though the context carries it here)!
> 
> In North America, "bomb" means figuratively a catastrophic failure,
> rather than a great success.

No, it doesn't.

You don't have children, do you?

Note that "That movie is _the_ bomb" is a linguistic reversal slang a la
"That's bad" from the mid-eighties, but "That movie is _a_ bomb" means
that the movie was bad, in a non-mid-eighties sense.

-Robin

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/