Friday, November 07, 2008

Pedants' Corner

For those of you who love words, and arguing protractedly about them, my new blog-pal Tony B and I had an amusing little spat in this thread the other day. I am pleased to say that I was eventually shown to be 'right' - although I had merely been following my gut instincts, while it was Tony who actually did the laborious research to settle the point.

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to out-pedant me, Tony! (Yes, I know: noun-into-verb again. But this is a humorous coinage of my own. And I didn't say it was never possible or useful to create new words this way, only that the Americans these days seem to want to do it all the time, and for no good reason.)

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