"last stitch effort"

[Baker, John]

        The uses below by the court of appeals and by the medical school dean are not interchangeable with "presumably."  The use by the Boston Globe is, and the editorial writer should have written "presumably."

        I take it that "assumably" is a word that has appropriate technical uses, primarily in legal writing, but I agree that it's inappropriate when used as a synonym for "presumably."  It strikes me that "assumably" would also be a useful word to philosophers, but I don't know if they actually use it.

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 10:42 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"


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:
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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