odiferous

[Jonathan Lighter]

Hmmmmm. Maybe I'll retract "stupidism," but etymologically it's still an erroneous form that seems to appear only in unabridged dictionaries.

  And, _pace_ Sir T. Browne, it can make you sound like a dope.

  JL




"Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
Subject: Re: odiferous
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 6/25/2006 07:47 PM, you wrote:
>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

Or even the "shortened forms of odoriferant, -ferous" that is in
OED2? (Citations from 14.. to 1977).

Joel

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