an innovation? (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE


Is this a case of someone using a word that they don't know well in an
attempt to sound more erudite than they really are? Is there a word for
_that_ phenomenon (of which I am guilty occasionally)?

>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: an innovation?
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
>
> At 3:56 PM -0500 2/28/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
> >Or just an error / mishearing for "parsing"?
> >
> >m a m
> >
> So "sparsing out the patterns" < "parsing out the patterns"?
> I did think "parse" was involved, but I was still not sure
> the source made sense.  I see from googling it, though, that
> there are a whole lot of people, esp. computer people, who do
> use "parse out" to mean something like "figure out" or "work
> out", and indeed the AHD includes a sense of "parse"
> (although not "parse out") within software contexts that
> relates to this sense.
>
> LH
>
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Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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