[Ads-l] Detrius surely counts, too

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Mar 28 03:08:48 UTC 2015


Reminds me of the time that I thought that there was a word, "enroach."
Then, I realized that there were actually *two* words, "enroach" and
"encroach," both with the same meaning.

That puts me a cut above the "detrius"-speakers who refuse to acknowledge
the existence of "detritus," I reckon. ;-)

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 4:42 AM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Detrius surely counts, too
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Two of us in my writing group today claimed the word is "detrius" and
> two that the word is "detritus." And all four of us claimed the other
> word didn't exist.
>
> The Oxford Dictionary site and Wiktionary have only detritus, and
> http://byjane.blogspot.com/2007/05/detritus-not-detrius.html explains
> that "detrius" is wrong.
>
> Google Books provides something like 2,000 hits for "detrius," including
> many scientific works (and some not English), so perhaps this is worthy
> of entry.
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Formerly of Seattle, WA
>
> Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/home
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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