"last stitch effort"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I prescribe that those people knock it off.

Because "assumably" bugs me.

One feature of a stupidism is that it bugs you (i.e., me) when a UNIVERSALLY FAMILIAR form wouldn't.  Even people who say "assumably" presumedly know and understand "presumably."  Supposably, anyhow.


JL
"Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Baker, John"
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"
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Well, "assumedly" is not terribly common, but what's wrong with it? I had no trouble finding several hundred uses by people who should know how to write. "Several hundred" is not a lot (a Google search for "assume," for example, produces over 8 million pages), but it's enough to suggest that "assumedly" is a viable word. Here are some examples:

>From a federal court of appeals: "Because illegal aliens are assumably removable at any time regardless of whether they have committed aggravated felonies in this country or not, Congress simply may have seen no need to emphasize in the statute that this class of individuals could not seek waiver." Moore v. Ashcroft, 251 F.3d 919, 925 (11th Cir. May 14, 2001).

>From an editorial in the Boston Globe, 1/22/1987: "In the best of all possible worlds, so goes the theory of Esperanto, everybody would speak the same language, and, assumably, everybody would understand everybody else."

>From formal written testimony before a congressional committee, 1/25/1994, by Stuart Bondurant, Chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges and Dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine: "As stated in the bill, hospitals must "operate" training programs to receive payments from this account, but hospitals that participate in affiliated programs assumably would not receive payments."

I await the prescriptivist response.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 7:52 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"


OED offers a single quote, from an 1883 magazine. I rest my case.

JL

"Baker, John" wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Baker, John"
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"
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In Webster's Collegiate, American Heritage, Century Dictionary . . . . What's wrong with assumably?

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 5:26 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"


Brace yourself. Within the past year or so I've also seen "assumably."
JL

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