indice

[Mark Mandel]

I've never heard it, only seen it, and assumed it to be a back form
from "indices" /'IndIsiz/, the (learned) plural of "index" in the
numerical sense, as opposed to the list sense.

m a m

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> 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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>



--
Mark Mandel

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