[Ads-l] "macocracy", 1780 & 1781, not in OED3
Joel S. Berson
Berson at ATT.NET
Thu Dec 25 21:26:20 UTC 2014
At 12/25/2014 01:48 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Why blur the otherwise-transparent derivation by respelling _mac-ocracy"_
>as the neologistically hyphen-dropped "macocracy"?
I omitted Charles Lee's hyphen because the neologistically
hyphen-dropped "macocracy" appears in modern (20th-century)
books. Isn't hyphen-dropping the modern thing? (I agree that the
derivation is more obvious with the hyphen. But the OED will surely
retain it when Lee's quotation is incorporated. And won't their
definition explain the derivation, whether or not the headword is hyphenated?)
Joel
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