retro "psych"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:33:04 -0400, Mark A. Mandel
<mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

>I wrote:
>
>>I very much doubt that the spelling "Psyche!" in the source material
>>represents a disyllabic pronunciation as in Greek myth. Probably it was
>>simply "Um, now how do I spell this? Use a silent 'e' there, right?", on
>>a word that the users understood as an abbreviation for "psychology",
>>give or take some syntactic tomfoolery, but had never seen in written
>>form, especially the "schoolkids".
>
>Ben Zimmer replied:
>   >>>>>
>Keep in mind that the other senses of "psych" as noun or verb (derived
>from "psychology", "psychic", "psychoanalyze", etc.) very often have
>"psyche" as an alternate spelling. In fact, for one sense -- a psychic
>(i.e., deceptive) bid in bridge -- the OED says "psyche" is the preferred
>spelling.
> <<<<<
>
>Nice evidence. So we're in agreement.

I guess I just bristled at the implication that it's primarily the ignernt
"schoolkids" who would use the "psyche" spelling. Those who spell the
interjection that way could very well have seen /saIk/ written as "psyche"
in its various other senses, since the spelling is quite common. The
Google ratios for "psych X out" vs. "psyche X out" run about even...

psych them out: 548 (241 unique)
psyche them out: 462 (256 unique)

psych yourself out: 1,189 (561 unique)
psyche yourself out: 955 (458 unique)

psych people out: 173 (105 unique)
psyche people out: 127 (73 unique)

(The "unique" scores are taken by adding <&start=900> to the end of the
URL to find the number of hits left after Google omits "similar" entries,
e.g.: <http://www.google.com/search?q="psyche+them+out"&start=900>.)


--Ben Zimmer