oncer

[Mark A. Mandel]

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> writes:

>>>>>
The OED has a 1938 citation (from American Speech) for "oncer in precisely
this sense.
<<<<<

(OED not at hand.) Which sense? I've seen two in this discussion:

 - nonce word: a word made up on the spur of the moment and not expected to be used again
 - hapax legomenon: a word observed only once in a language or corpus

The difference is in the scope of the oncity, or uniqueness.

"Oncity", or "once-ity" as I might have spelled it to convey the intended
pronunciation clearly, is a jocular spur-of-the-moment coinage, literally
invented as I was typing the sentence: a nonce word. In a hypothetical
"Collected Writings and Utterances of Mark Alan Mandel" it would also be a
hapax legomenon. But the latter term is a corpus-statistical
characterization, while the former refers also to my mental state when
using it: it's not a word that was in my vocabulary before or one that,
having coined it, I expect to use again.

Having said that, I suppose that "oncer", being a term of dialectologists
and lexicographers, refers to corpus linguistics and means 'hapax
legomenon', not 'nonce word'. Right?

   Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company
          Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com