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Joined: Mar 2000
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Mildly astonished by the waves created in these august circles by the use of to composit, I should like to hypothesize that if to compose is allowed to descend from to pose then why shouldn't posit give birth to composit?
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Joined: Oct 2000
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veteran
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veteran
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why shouldn't posit give birth to composit?Good point, wsieb. Hang on, wouldn't posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a positition ? That's where I have to start ing.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
I had not thought of this provenance for the term - in all of the Tu conferences that I have attended, the word used was "compositE", which, I assumed, referred to the fact that a number of similar motions were amalgamated into one which combined the worst features of all of them. (pardon my cynicism - it's a common disease among those who have moved in TU circles for anything over twenty years)
But I can see merit in wseib's approach - and it is certainly more elegant.
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Joined: Mar 2000
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
Hang on, wouldn't posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a positition ?
Or presumably (too obviously?), simply a position?
Speaking of awful regularisations, any opinion on burgle versus the americanoregularisationalistic burglarise ?
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
>wouldn't posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a positition ? Or presumably (too obviously?), simply a position?
But position derives from pose rather than posit, no?
It can't derive from both. Or maybe it can.
Oh, I give up!
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Joined: Mar 2000
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
I hadn't noticed that wsieb's note had dropped the final 'e'. Elegant it may be, but if there's no infinitive version in evidence (look up the corpus dammit), then it ain't a word.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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When has that ever been a bar to its use in this forum?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
Technically speaking, burglarise is a back-formation, like "edit", which derived from "editor" rather than the other way round. I agree it's an ugly and unnecessary one.
Bingley
Bingley
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Joined: Sep 2000
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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"Burgle" is such a lovely-sounding word; it would be a pity to replace it with "burglarize". Mind you, it's a waste to apply it to house-breaking - it should be used for something more onomatopoeically appropriate than the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Just realized why 'burgle' sounds so ridiculous to me-- it makes me think of a bugle gurgling.
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