Made out of people

In another life...

.... I want to go back into the liberal arts and be a linguist. Doesn't this sound like fun?

Here's an entry from the OED's Day in the Life
(via LanguageHat )

Apart from othering (see above), I have been preoccupied with participles. Assigned the simple task of putting together a definition and quotation paragraph for the literal sense of the adjectival compound ‘oiled-up’ — which one would expect to appear in print well before the more fanciful metaphorical extensions of the term — I've hit upon a possible first quotation from Dickens' Hard Times: ‘All the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.’ But is this, on second thought, more verb than adjective, with its implied ‘elephants [that had been]...oiled up’? It would be a shame not to be able to use the quotation: it would make a fine counterbalance to the ‘oiled-up love god’ who features in the last quotation in my draft entry, from a 2002 issue of Smash Hits magazine.