"Follow-upped" (and other Fresh Air anomalies)

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:17 PM -0400 8/19/04, Orin Hargraves wrote:
>Long as we're on Fresh Air: a couple of weeks ago, Retired Army Gen. Tommy
>Franks, while being interviewed by Terry Gross, and speaking about a figure in
>the Bush administration, said that the fellow's remarks were "not sequitur."
>In the context, it was clear that he meant to characterize the guy as someone
>whose thinking was unconventional and gratuitously "outside the box," usually
>irritatingly so.
>
>This one was new to me and seems virtually unattested: most Google results for
>"not sequitur" show that the writer is unaware of the usual form and/or
>syntactic requirements of "non sequitur."
>
I'm sure that's true, but at the same time some of them no doubt
represent a psychologically induced typo for those who really do know
better.  I'm perfectly aware that the Latin word for 'not' is _non_ ,
yet in my (many) works on negation I'm constantly finding myself
mistyping the latter as the former, both within an extended Latin
text and no doubt on occasion in borrowed sequences like "not
sequitur", "not compos mentis", et al., in the same way that I often
let a final -n slip in when I'm typing the Latin word _negatio_.  I
usually (but non always) catch these errors in time.

larry