Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 March 10

= March 10 =

"... an Ivy or a safety"
Hi all,

Oh the primaries, don't ya love 'em? No WP:CIVIL to worry about. And they give political cartoonists who hate freedom and are probably from Canada anyway great material.

In the sixth panel of this Doonesbury cartoon is the phrase "whether he went to an Ivy or a safety". While it's obvious what "an Ivy" is, what does "a safety" mean when it refers to a college?

--Shirt58 (talk) 04:32, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * A "safety college" is an easier-to-get-into college you apply to, in case you are rejected by your preferred choice. StuRat (talk) 04:39, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Or sometimes a cheaper state school you apply to as a backup, in case your preferred school can't arrange a good enough financial aid package for you. Rmhermen (talk) 05:12, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I googled "safety school", and the first thing that came up said it's a college that's very easy to get into, synonymous with "backup school". Meanwhile, given the fascistic comments of right-wingers during this campaign, it's pretty funny for the OP to call cartoonist Trudeau someone who "hates freedom". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:51, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks all. Appears to be a widely recognized slang term, but more appropriate to Urban Dictionary than Wiktionary.  (Er, safety school?!?)  And a timely reminder that I shouldn't write Ref Desk questions in AmE, when I am not an American. --Shirt58 (talk) 10:20, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Isn't "hates freedom" pretty much synonymous with "disagrees even in the slightest part with whoever most influences the key political offices of the United States of America"? After all, it's those key political offices who decide what counts as "freedom" throughout the entire world". J I P  &#124; Talk 22:08, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yup. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:26, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

French word order
If the object of a question is a pronoun, do inversion and whatever the thing with pronouns is called combine to give an OVS word order? (e.g. Me voit-il?) --108.225.112.237 (talk) 22:57, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not a native speaker, but I'm pretty sure Me voit-il? is grammatical (see this 18th-century French grammar), though other ways of forming questions (e.g. Est-ce qu'il me voit?, Il me voit?) are more common and idiomatic nowadays. Angr (talk) 23:58, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The construction you have given is perfectly grammatical (if a little stiff in everyday language).  Omg †  osh 00:05, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Que sais-je?... AnonMoos (talk) 05:29, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The construction is grammatical, and you could call it OVS, but it involves clitics, which often have their own distinct ordering. "Me" must precede the verb, so at some level "me voit" is a constituent which cannot be reordered. --ColinFine (talk) 09:38, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Exactly, one could never say "Le chien voit-il?" or "Me voit-Jean?", so one cannot call the whole languege OVS-friendly. --85.119.25.27 (talk) 10:09, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The sentence "Le chien voit-il ?" is perfectly grammatical, but it means "Can the dog see?" I think 85.119.25.27 wanted to say "Can the dog see me?" (in a French ungrammatical manner). "Le chien voit." → "Le chien voit-il ?" (correct) — "Le chien me voit." → "Le chien me voit-il ?" (correct) / "Me le chien voit-il ?" (wrong) — AldoSyrt (talk) 09:18, 13 March 2012 (UTC)