Home Deprovement; Eventeurs; Javachino

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:14 AM -0400 9/4/00, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>HOME DEPROVEMENT
>
>     From DAN'S PAPERS (largest weekly circulation in the Hamptons plus
>Manhattan Delivery), 1 September 2000, pg. 31:
>
>_Home Deprovements_
>_Some Sample Decisions--That Actually Happened--To Devalue Your Home_
>
>    Irregardless of the fact that it's not in OED--is "deprovement" now a word?
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I checked for "deprove" and "deprovement" on google and located a
number of hits, although many of the former were obvious instances of
orthographically challenged renderings of "deprive".  Here are a
couple of typical cites for deprovement:

    As John Gerstner used to say, "There's always room for deprovement."
    Total Depravity does not imply utter depravity. We have the
opportunity for "deprovement."

and of course there are a number of instances where "deprovement" is
primed by its somewhat more established antonym:
======
And high levels of organization are intrinsically less likely than
simpler levels. With
highly organized systems (e.g., organisms, polities, ecosystems),
there is `little room for   improvement' but much room for
deprovement.
======

In my own experience, I play poker with a friend who frequently
complains "This hand just keeps deproving" or, after a shuck (free
substitution), "I just DEproved".  But she's a professional
syntactician, so the datum is somewhat suspect.  (That is, she may be
mentally including her own scare quotes, as in the written "Total
Depravity" example above.)

larry