[antedating] "snuck" 1881

[Jonathan Lighter]

My own take on "not a real word" is that it means, "I fear that a certain English teacher in my past would have raked me painfully over the coals for innocently and unsuspectingly using this word, so you better not use it either. Moron!"

  As I mentioned long ago, "to incent" sounds stupid to me, undoubtedly, in part, for unconscious or preconscious reasons, and I don't like it. However, that's as far as I choose to meddle in other people's lives.  I do not make "global" (ugh!) judgments about character and intelligence based on isolated items of usage.

  Except in sentences of the type, "Irregardless, you're lookin' for fat lip, mofo!"

  JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: [antedating] "snuck" 1881
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On Nov 24, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> I was caught yesterday in the middle of one of those tedious
> discussions about whether "snuck" is a "real word." I affirmed that
> it was, at least in the good ol' U.S. of A. When
> that didn't work I tried sarcasm: "If it isn't a word, what is
> it?" This was met by knowing nods on the one side and looks of
> disbelief and pity on the other. Clearly _argumentum ad
> authoritatem_ does not work in such cases.

i've been working on a Language Log posting on this "not a word" stuff
for some time now, since Eugene Volokh ranted on his blog about it a
while ago:

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_08_19-2007_08_25.shtml#1187738395

i took a bash at the topic a while back --

AZ, 11/17/04: Not a word!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001652.html

but i think it's time for another.

arnold

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