error

Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Sat Aug 1 04:19:46 UTC 2009


Arnold,

What do you make of "keeps apace with"?  Google give 600k raw hits of
"keep apace" and 24 million for "keep pace."  Merriam-Webster gives a
second meaning:

  (2  : abreast —used with of or with<trying to keep apace with
changes in technology>)

Herb

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Arnold Zwicky<zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      error
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 27, 2009, at 4:38 AM, Arun K Raman wrote (emphasis mine):
>
>> I remember growing up in India when an older friend would tell me
>> what the
>> words fuck and bitch meant and at that time those words probably
>> meant the
>> same thing as the word bread to me. He probably held them in a
>> slightly
>> reverential regard. There was no other reason for him to tell them
>> to me.
>> The culture in India now has changed quite a bit and keeps apace
>> with the
>> rest of the world. I have no _probably_ with the words myself and
>> use them but
>> in select company.
>
> a lovely error in word retrieval.  after two uses of the adverb
> "probably", Arun Raman reaches for the noun "problem" and gets the
> orthographically/phonologically similar adverb again.
>
> arnold
>
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