findability--a real word?!

[Bill Palmer]

On a related note, a major general commanding a logistics operation being
interviewed on the local ABC affiliate today made mention of military
equipment being shipped out of Iraq, and units will later "reget" it.

As with the previously noted items, there's prob'ly a limit on the number of
"re_" verbs that can have their own citation.

Bill Palmer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: findability--a real word?!


> ---------------------- 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: findability--a real word?!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:56 AM -0700 8/25/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>>On Aug 25, 2010, at 10:40 AM, David Barnhart wrote:
>>
>>>  An e-mail in today's barrage of messages was entitled "Findability fake
>>>  word, real problem.  Not in OED, New Words Concordance, nor the
>>> Dictionary
>>>  Companion.  But, _findable_ is in OED (c1449)...  _Findability_
>>>certainly is as much a real
>>>  word as many of the stunt words that are noticed in the WOTY exercise.
>>
>>i thought the generalization was with an adjective in -able you got
>>the derived abstract noun in -abil-ity for free.  innovate
>>_discussable_ and you get _discussability_.
>
> Not to mention the negative counterparts thereof, whence
> _undiscussable_, _undiscussability_.
>
>>  surely only a small number of -abil-ity nouns merit tracking and
>>citations in the OED.
>
> Ditto for _un-_ adjectives, except the ones (more abundant than with
> the -ability/-ibility nominalizations) that undergo semantic drift.
>
> larry
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


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