"last stitch effort"

[Baker, John]

        Sorry, all references should be to "assumably."

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Mark A. Mandel
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 5:50 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "last stitch effort"


John Baker quoth:
>>>>>

        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 [...]

        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,
[...]:  "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.
 <<<<<

I await the citations of "assumedly". All of the above citations are of
"assumABly". Or do I misunderstand the argument?

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]