Disrespect & partake in

[Rudolph C Troike]

After some initial puzzlement when "to dis(s)" began showing up on TV
programs in the mouths of black characters, I figured out that it was a
derivative of "to disrespect" (though it could have as easily come from
"disparage"). What bothered me most about it, though, was the fact that I
couldn't use "disrespect" as a verb, so the "dis(s)" usage really bothered
my internal processor.
        As for "partake in", it sounds like some sort of permutation
of (or perhaps from) "take part in", which is the only locution I could
use.
        I'm not surprised at the response of Dale Coye's students. I find
the present  age-group has a very fragile Sprachgefuhl about the
collocational and derivational intricacies of English, so their responses
probably tell little about their actual usage. After using "Caesar's
conquest of Gaul" as an example nominalization of "Caesar conquered Gaul"
with my undergrad English grammar class, I asked it on a quiz and got back
a number of responses with "Caesar's conquering of Gaul" both as gerund
and nominal. The same happened with "I completed the quiz", with
"completing" for both (I gave up trying to get a nominalization for "I
analyzed the sentence" after several years yielded primarily "analyzation"
even after "analysis" was used earlier in the quiz as a model).
        Don't forget the classic story of the spread of "dove" as past
tense of "dive" precisely because it was embedded in textbooks published
in the North to discourage what was regarded as a nonstandard usage, and
has now become a marker of education. Butterflies' wings can start all
sorts of things.
        Rudy