odiferous

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Jun 25 23:47:12 UTC 2006


At 6:29 AM -0700 6/24/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Alisyn Camerota of _Fox & Friends_ just used the word "odiferous."
>Her two co-hosts then began to laugh and tease her for having "been
>reading her vocabulary book."  TV news people usually make fun of
>words that might be unfamiliar to a tenth-grader.
>
>   But they didn't make fun of "odiferous" for being a stupidism for
>"odoriferous."  Google offers 100,000 hits.  Microsoft Word's
>spellchecker is said to accept, nay, to recommend it.
>
>   JL
>
Are we sure the intended lexical item wasn't in fact "odiferous",
which I assume would mean 'hate-bearing', an eminently plausible
meaning for a lexical item on Fox News to bear?

LH

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