"Prophesize" Not in the Dictionaries

[Wilson Gray]

On Mar 26, 2005, at 3:37 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Prophesize" Not in the Dictionaries
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>>> Maybe this is just an error for "prophesy"?
>>>
>>> I don't see the adjective "principle" in the dictionaries at a
>>> glance,
>>> although it is used freely by otherwise respectable writers. I don't
>>> see
>>> the popular word "wierd" (>1 million hits) either.
>> Not quite the same, since the former involves a morphological
>> variant, the latter two only orthographic ones.
>
> Not the best analogies, I agree. Perhaps

>  "conversate" for "converse" (v.)

Isn't "conversate" slang? Since I was a teenager, this has been used in
the sense of "sweet-talk" v.

-Wilson Gray

> would be more comparable (20,000 supposed hits by naive Google).
> Anyway, many 'errors' or 'nonstandard variants' (of various types),
> even
> very common ones and even ones which have been in use for a long time,
> are
> excluded from the dictionaries. Any question of whether or not this is
> 'good' I'll leave to R. H. Fiske et al.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>