[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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