repropriate

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Fri Oct 26 19:02:56 UTC 2012


At 10/26/2012 02:38 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Oct 26, 2012, at 10:27 AM, "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
> >
> > More seriously, my suggestion of a blend of "reproduce" with
> > "propagate" had in mind the transformation of "agate" into
> > "iate".  And they don't compete for "the same slot", one competes
> > (with "repropriate") at the beginning and the other at the conclusion.
>
>my allusion to competition was to the standard story (discussed on
>this list a number of times and in many other places) about how most
>inadvertent blends arise: in planning for language production, two
>elements (words, in the case we're talking about) are entertained as
>a filler for some slot in planning an utterance; as a result of this
>competition, the speaker ends up producing a combination of the two
>-- the beginning of one with the end of the other (and, usually,
>with some shared material in the middle).

That is I think what I had in mind -- re [from re-produce] + prop
[from re-prod-uce & prop-agate] + iate [from prop-agate modified into
-iate].  Is the "imperfection" that -iate isn't -agate?

Joel


>that led to my comments about the imperfections of "reproduce" +
>"propagate" as the source of "repropriate".
>
>arnold
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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