indice

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 22, 2008, at 6:05 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> Jacques Berlinerblau, in his On Faith column on today's Washington
> Post web site, writes, "Yet as an indice of some of the lines of
> attack that the McCain camp is employing it is of great interest."...

Bill Walsh blog on the word:
   http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/03/ice-ice-baby.html

(Walsh lists "tamale" as a similar example, and also notes the
spelling "lense" for "lens".)

googling on {"an indice"} gets a fair number of examples, from
mathematics, social science, and various other domains.

> ... Grant Barrett and Martha
> Barnett discuss the word on "A Way with Words" and find that it's used
> mostly in finance.  One emailer on their site writes, "The discussion
> on index and indece [sic] was interesting. It surprised me when the
> indice term was indicated as not being real, (my unabridged dictionary
> agreed on it not being real, durn it) I have commonly used index as a
> fixed number or the result of a study, and indice as the immeadiate or
> approximate value, which when recorded would become an index. Index
> had more impact than indice. I will probably continue using the two
> terms, but, hopefully will only use "index" in reports or
> presentations."

nice example of semantic differentiation of variants.

>  He says that he thinks he picked the term up thirty
> years ago when he was working with some French engineers.

i've heard the word for some time, but always pronounced /Ind at si],
with primary stress on the first syllable and secondary stress on the
third.  it's hard to see how you could get this from the french
*pronunciation* of (the french word) "indice" (rather than by back-
formation from english "indices").  on the other hand, the french
*spelling* might conceivably be pronounced /Ind at si/ (though this is a
bit of a stretch).

arnold

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