Thou shalt be trespassed, as it were
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BREAKING: University of Florida students chose to breakdown their encampment after being handed this of Allowable Activities and Prohibitive Items and Activities.
— Stu (@thestustustudio) April 26, 2024
Look at those Consequences for Non-Compliance
University of Florida's chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of… pic.twitter.com/l4jYjrSVcr
I still feel uncomfortable with all three usages of "trespass" in the final section of the tweet.
Selected readings
- "You will be trespassed automatically" (8/1/23)
- "Not permission, to violate to punish" (5/8/14)
Jim Breen said,
April 27, 2024 @ 6:36 am
I don't like "breakdown" as a verb.
Philip Taylor said,
April 27, 2024 @ 6:58 am
Neither do I (it should clearly be two words). But far more do I dislike "Prohibitive items …" (which should equally clearly be "Prohibited …") which is seemingly part of an official University document, unlike the Twxxt. But then one has to ask "If 'No amplified sound'" is prohibitive/prohibited, then surely it must follow that 'amplified sound' is permitted. Altogether an unholy mess (and let’s not even get into "Prosecutees will be trespassed" …).
J.W. Brewer said,
April 27, 2024 @ 7:16 am
This transitive use of "to trespass" was documented as widespread in that 8/23 thread, however awkward it may seem to the ears of those unaccustomed to it. But I might recommend a university, in particular, strike a higher-register tone by using the mock-Latinate "to rusticate," in what this reference has as sense 1 of the verb. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rusticate Although I suppose it's possible that the students to whom the warning is addressed might not have that verb in their lexicon, thus undercutting the short-term effectiveness of the warning.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 27, 2024 @ 7:48 am
One other thing in that tweet that's lexically odd is the YDSA activists referring to their "encampment" as a, or the, "liberation zone." Now, "liberated zone" would make perfect sense in context. It might perhaps seem risible or pretentious or poseurish to outsiders, but would parse perfectly well as reflecting what might plausibly be the activists' own point of view. I.e., here is the small portion of Gainesville, Florida that we have freed from the oppressive control of the capitalist/imperialist/Zionist/what-have-you authorities! But "liberation zone" is not to my ear an available alternative way to express that concept, and to the extent I have a sense of what other concepts it might be suitable for expressing, they don't make much sense in this context.
jhh said,
April 27, 2024 @ 11:00 am
So, here, "trespass" (both the verb and the noun) seem to mean "ban." Why bother to tiptoe around that particular word?
DaveK said,
April 27, 2024 @ 11:22 am
@jjhh:
Trespassing is a legal offense and I take that usage to mean that not only will people be asked to get out and stay out, but that charges will be filed against them.
Victor Mair said,
April 27, 2024 @ 12:22 pm
"shall / will be charged with trespassing"
David Marjanović said,
April 27, 2024 @ 3:05 pm
I blame autocorrupt – also for the complete disappearance of a while.
Joe said,
April 27, 2024 @ 6:07 pm
I've heard "to trespass someone" in the context of retail shops that ban an unruly customer, meaning if this person is seen here again staff should call the police to arrest them as a trespasser. That vocational jargon usage makes it sound even weirder coming from a university administration (at least to me).
John Swindle said,
April 28, 2024 @ 2:34 am
Large public universities have campus security divisions. Although the bulletin is from the "Division of Student Life," the security folks will have had a hand in drafting it. Their use of language may differ in subtle ways from that of professors in the same institution.
David Morris said,
April 28, 2024 @ 6:26 am
Speech is free and handheld signs are cheap but all those other items and activities are obviously expensive to the point of being prohibitive.
Michael P said,
April 28, 2024 @ 6:34 am
Joe is correct. Places like stores and college campuses are preemptively open to all. The use of "trespass" as a verb here does not mean filing charges of trespass, but rather giving someone a trespass notice saying that their future presence at the place is prohibited. Depending on the jurisdiction, that kind of notice may be required before trespassing charges can be filed for public accommodations — and sometimes the police must be involved, providing a third party that has a record of trespass notices.
David Charlton said,
April 28, 2024 @ 7:05 am
"Verbing weirds language", Calvin and Hobbs
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1p70n2/calvin_explains_how_to_english/
Stephen Goranson said,
April 28, 2024 @ 7:39 am
During the time I worked in Duke University Library, a few individuals were, for various reasons, banned, using the term "trespassed," either from the library or from the entire campus.
Terry Hunt said,
April 28, 2024 @ 12:01 pm
@ J.W. Brewer – "liberation zone" works for me in the sense, not of a zone that has been liberated, but of a zone in which liberation is being advocated.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 28, 2024 @ 2:21 pm
@Terry Hunt, I guess I can see "liberation zone" for a zone in which liberation is somehow being practiced or enacted but not so much for a zone in which advocacy in favor of liberation in some other, geographically distant zone is taking place. But not everyone's native-speaker-ear will have the same intuitions.
John P. said,
April 28, 2024 @ 9:00 pm
"…as we forgive those who trespass against us."
Peter Taylor said,
April 29, 2024 @ 4:26 am
Trespassing aside,
Is building structures to be interpreted as a noun phrase or a verb phrase? None of those really fit my understanding of a building structure (NP); but nor is it obvious that bringing a chair in order to protest sitting down would qualify as building it, and stake seems to be really stretching the concept of a structure.
ohwilleke said,
April 29, 2024 @ 6:52 pm
Just heard someone used "trespassed" in the sense of something to do to someone in the near future for the first this weekend at a grocery store where I homeless man was disturbing customers.
Tye Power said,
April 29, 2024 @ 11:44 pm
Aside from the "scary" shall, the usage here sounds normal. Disruptive folks are often trespassed from stores.
Terry Hunt said,
April 30, 2024 @ 4:20 am
@ J.W. Brewer – what has primed me for that interpretation are past declarations of various local government administrations in the UK (and elsewhere) of their areas of jurisdiction to be "nuclear-free zones".
Of course, few if any of them had any danger of either nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons being sited in them, though some perhaps of nuclear weapons being transported through them, nor would they have had any way of enforcing their stance if the national government had decided to do so: it was a way of 'officially' recording their opposition (for what it was worth) to nuclear war or nuclear weapons proliferation worldwide.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 30, 2024 @ 7:14 am
@Terry Hunt: I also recall those prior "zones." But "free zone" seems to me parallel to "liberated zone." The parallel to "liberation zone" would be "freedom zone." I suppose "nuclear-freedom zone" might be a bit ambiguous, but in googling the history of "free zone" I find numerous late 19th-century references to the "Mexican Free Zone." Which perhaps could have been ambiguous turns out not to be a zone free of Mexicans but a zone of Mexican territory adjacent to the U.S. border where, as a matter of Mexican law, goods entering from the U.S. were not subject to Mexican tariffs and perhaps other customs regulations. Depending on who you asked this was either to ease economic burdens on remote frontier communities that depended on cross-border trade for their survival or to facilitate smuggling. I suppose these explanations or rationales are not mutually exclusive.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 30, 2024 @ 7:22 am
For a parallel to this use of "trespassed," I have just recalled from the dim recesses of memory the jargon of a particular private club where, at least as of the old days, if you got too far behind in paying your bills you were liable to get "posted." "Posted" in this case meaning something like "have your name included on a list posted on the wall (in such-and-such standard location somewhere near the front door) of delinquent members whose charging privileges had been suspended." I'm not quite sure through the haze of decades to what extent the public nature of the posting was intended to incentivize payment by shaming deadbeats in the eyes of their fellow members versus just being a convenient way, in an era when things were not all automated and computerized, to remind the staff who was a deadbeat who should not be allowed to put any further charges on his tab until the arrears were taken care of. If you understood the practice, it was convenient shorthand; if you didn't, it was a somewhat opaque and confusing locution.
Kim said,
May 1, 2024 @ 6:41 am
"To trespass someone"/"to be trespassed" is something that is long familiar to those low down on the socioeconomic ladder but astonishing and commentworthy to those higher up — or so I've noticed over the last decade or two. It's not unusual for my clients to be confused by what's meant by constructions like "trespassing is forbidden", because they're so used to being the object and not the subject of that verb.