postilion sentence

noun

Etymology

Refers to the phrase "My postillion has been struck by lightning," said to be an example of the unusual terms found in some 19th- and early 20th-century phrasebooks.

Definitions

1
A phrase that is linguistically correct, but of no realistically practical use.
- As good as the peccadillo sentence is, it is not on a par with the postilion sentence. Nothing is. That sentence is cast in golden moonshine and should never be disturbed.
- To test whether a candidate sentence is a postilion sentence, all we have to do is try to identify the context(s) in which it would be used. If we have difficulty finding a plausible context, then we have such a sentence.
- In the practice sentence, C emulates P’s model and provides another model or postilion sentence.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for postilion sentence. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA