Re: THEORY: lexical shift [was Re: Time machine]

On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 00:52, Muke Tever wrote:

> 4 - It borrows commercial terms, e.g. xerox(tm), picard(tm) maneuver
What's a Picard manoeuvre[1]?

[1]: Just a question about the American spelling of that word. Had
/nj/ > /n/ already happened by the time American spellings were redone?
'maneuver' really suggests /m{nj@v@(r)/ as it's pronunciation. (cf. e.g.
'euphemism'.)

> Brand *spanking* new words are more likely to come out of 1 and 4, although
> science invents a few every now and then ('google' as mentioned, 'quark'
> lifted out of FW).  Both science and everyday language are probably more
> likely to create words out of new combinations of old morphemes.
'Googol', actually. The popular search engine re-spelt it to look more
English, but 'googol' is still the correct spelling of the word for
10^100.

Tristan.