[Lexicog] Re: Frequency counts as a lexicographic measure

[Rudolph C Troike]

I was startled the other evening in listening to a prominent physician in
the public health area who was being interviewed on TV, use the word
"immersement" rather than the expected "immersion". Never having heard it
before, I checked on Google and found 919 occurrences compared to
5,340,000 for "immersion". I wonder whether any dictionary has entered
this form? In this case, it seemed to be used by the speaker when he had
a momentary problem searching for the right term, and apparently used this
as a default production.

In a similar fashion, I have increasingly encountered "abolishment"
replacing "abolition", but here I suspect that it is not only lack of
familiarity with the latter, but perhaps also its historical association
with Lincoln's expedient wartime action of declaring slaves within
territory not controlled by US forces to be free, to be the impetus for
a connotationally more neutral term. I find that even the Concise Oxford
Dictionary-10th edition on my desktop includes this form.

	Rudy Troike



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