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#10726 11/02/01 03:34 AM
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One of my pet peeves is the illogical use of the "ee" suffix to denote one doing something instead of being the object of an action. "Inductee", "amputee", "transferee", etc. may not be elegant, but you know where they stand, grammatically speaking. But "escapee"?? Since it obviously means, one who is escaping or has escaped, how does it come to have that suffix? If a noun has to be made from "escape" it should be "escaper" or "escapist" (ugh! better to conclude that no such noun has to be made.) There are others along this line which escape me at the moment.


#10727 11/02/01 03:41 AM
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Your mention of the large animals which swim in the Florida waters (there is one which visits the Chesapeake Bay from time to time) reminds me of my departed father-in-law (he should rest in peace)(it's 20 minutes from being All Souls Day). He used to refer to them as Manichees, which gives you a chuckle if you know what a Manichee is/was.


#10728 11/02/01 04:24 AM
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windwords,

the only word for jargon I can think of that includes 'art' is pretty much of a stretch: ARgoT
<shrugs>


#10729 11/02/01 04:59 AM
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I think "terms of art" is the expression you're looking for, windword.

Bingley


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#10730 11/02/01 05:42 PM
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Father Steve adjures us Don't let this happen to a language you love.*

Really! Next thing you know people will be leaving the inflectional suffixes off of words and we'll have to resort to word order or prepositions or some such neoplastic tommy-rot to understand what other people mean.

Just out of curiosity, what's so ugly about mentee? Mentor has taken on a meaning different nor that of teacher and student doesn't differentiate between the the recipient of teaching (Oooh, ooh, ooooh, teachee) and that of mentoring.

*This is just the sort of stuff that makes me love the language



#10731 11/02/01 05:53 PM
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*This is just the sort of stuff that makes me love the language

nah, you'm just a awkid cussee


#10732 11/02/01 09:43 PM
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One of Father Steve's back-formations:

polymentoricity -- having many guides or teachers

It runs trippingly off the tongue. It is virtually meaningless. It is polysyllabic. It has all the right qualifications for a word which just begs to be dropped into conversations regardless of context or audience.

I shall use it all the time!

e.g. No, I know that the suppliers haven't done what they said they would. I think that this just another example of the polymentoricity of the relationship, don't you?







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#10733 11/02/01 09:59 PM
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I am certain to use this as one of the hudred or so other meaningless words that will grace the title for my PhD dissertation. When HELL freezes over!! My half-brother has a PhD in education and his dissertation has exactly null content. A hundred and fifty pages of absolute BS!

I'm happy with the lack of education that I have




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#10734 11/03/01 09:06 AM
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The -ee ending seems in English to be passive in sense, since we have pairs like employer/employee; but the passive use derives (in French, Latin, and English) from the fact that it's a past participle: I have escaped. With a transitive verb, it serves both grammatical functions: I have employed; I have been employed.

I regard escapee as the plain English word for it, and wince at the ugly escaper occasionally substituted for it.

Escaper sounds like a neologism, because it's so unfamiliar, though in fact it's older, and escapee dates (in English) only from 1865.


#10735 11/03/01 06:20 PM
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...and escapee dates (in English) only from 1865.

No imagination, you Poms. The first prison escape in 1865? Huh!



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