ALAS, ALACK, dear Comrades all. A big lack. Case closed. Defense rested. Post is posthumous.
STANG IS DEAD. Actor Arnold Stang passed away 20 Dec 2009 aged 91. Only 5’ 3” but he stood tall and upright to the very end.
Stang played Sparrow, Sinatra’s side-kick in The Man with the Golden Arm. He co-starred with the then ‘unknown’ Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York (1970). The billing was Arnold Stang and Arnold Strong!
(Times obit today 20 Jan 2010)
PS: whenever I hear words described as archaic, rare, arcane, or jargonic [there’s new one, perhaps], my reaction is SEZ-WHO? Sometimes there’s some statistical support, although based on very meager data: there are no divine word-watchers counting who is saying/typing what & how often, pace web, webster, wiki, oed, google and the CIA. In fact, it would be impossible for our omnipresent, never-sleeping lexicographers to know how to divide all our messy utterances into chunks called words (word being one of the hardest words to define). It’s easy to turn off here. We all know what words are. I would still recommend a glance at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/howmany.htm
for a crisp explanation of why easy questions (How many words in a given language? How many does the average speaker KNOW and how many does s/he actually USE?) are so hard to answer. It does affect our debates on VN’s use of stang etc. How rare is rare? How old is archaic?
Is UNFRIEND (voted Word of the Year for 2009) a NEW word? Noun or verb? Do we NEED to find it in a dictionary before understanding its meaning/usage, and accepting it as a REAL word worthy of the word word? Will it survive or become branded RARE &/or ARCHAIC?
Rarity can be a subjective/anecdotal judgment. Rare often means ‘Never heard of X (stang, omoplate, szizzydoodle), are you sure it’s a word? How are spelling that?’ Presence in a dictionary CONFIRMS ‘existence,’ but absence does not DISCONFIRM.
Archaic means ‘Lord, I last heard (stang) years ago, before the railways came; we now call it (rail). Calling it (stang), folks would giggle and call you senile.’ The speaker may be unaware that in the next County, (stang) still thrives, and (rail) is just a bird.
SKB