Encountered in going through stuff on Facebook: the episode “Fozzie encounters a bit of a language barrier” from “Rocky Mountain Holiday”, a 1983 Muppet special; in the episode, Fozzie Bear describes himself to Gonzo (a character of ambiguous species) following on reports of a bear in their vicinity:
Have you not noticed that I also am of the ursine persuasion … I’m a bear too and I speak fluent bearish
A huge ferocious bear appears, the main characters flee to Kermit the Frog, and Fozzie explains:
Gonzo! Gonzo! Just a slight dialect problem … she speaks Grizzly and I only speak Paddington
You can watch the episode on YouTube here.
(Nice ellipsis of the BEAR in grizzly bear (the name of a type of bear) and Paddington Bear (the proper name, on the pattern of FN + LN, roughly like Stanford Linguist) of a fictional bear, discovered in London’s Paddington Station), as if they were structurally parallel.
The principal characters:
Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo
The jocular noun persuasion. As in (someone) of the ursine persuasion ‘a bear’. Sense 2c from NOAD:
noun persuasion: 2 [a] a belief or set of beliefs, especially religious or political ones: writers of all political persuasions. [b] a group or sect holding a particular religious belief: the village had two chapels for those of the Methodist persuasion. [c] humorous any group or type of person or thing linked by a specified characteristic, quality, or attribute: an ancient gas oven of the enamel persuasion.
These senses are developments of persuasion as a nominalization of the verb persuade in the following sense (from NOAD):
verb persuade: [b] [with object] cause (someone) to believe something, especially after a sustained effort; convince: [with object and clause]: he did everything he could to persuade the police that he was the robber | they must often be persuaded of the potential severity of their drinking problems.
In persuasion 2a and b, someone has been persuaded of some set of ideas, typically religious or political ones, thereby gaining membership in the set of people holding these beliefs, the persuaded people; they are then of this set of persuaded ones, ones of this persuasion.
But then being of some persuasion can break free of its persuasive origins and be seen simply as an assertion of belonging to a group — and so can jocularly be extended to membership in any group whatsoever (a young man of effeminate persuasion), and then further extended from human beings to any concrete thing (giving the gas oven of the enamel persuasion in NOAD‘s 2c). No, that gas oven was not persuaded to be enameled.
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