* * * * *
                                        
                                Pleonasmologist
                                        
Bunny acts as my editor, sending me spelling errors and grammar mistakes. So
it wasn't terribly surprising to find the following note from her:

> “maniacally” as in “laughing” … 
> 

I knew when writing this entry [1] that I was in trouble with the word
“maniacly.” “But I did a Google search [2],” I said to Bunny. “And that's
what came out.”

Bunny looked at me suspiciously, and started a few Google searches of her
own. And she found:

> Morphemes [3], not just words, can enter the realm of pleonasm: Some word-
> parts are simply optional in various languages and dialects. A familiar
> example to American English speakers would be the allegedly optional “-al-
> ”, probably most commonly seen in “publically” vs. “publicly”—both
> spellings are considered correct/acceptable in American English, and both
> pronounced the same, in this dialect, rendering the “publically” spelling
> pleonastic in US English; in other dialects it is “required”, while it is
> quite conceivable that in another generation or so of American English it
> will be “forbidden”. This treatment of words ending in “-ic”, “-ac”, etc.,
> is quite inconsistent in US English—compare “maniacally” or “forensically”
> with “eroticly” or “heroicly”; “forensicly” doesn't look “right” to any
> English speakers, but “erotically” doesn't look “right” to many Americans.
> Some (mostly US-based) prescriptive grammar [4] pundits would say that the
> “-ly” not “-ally” form is “correct” in any case in which there is no “-
> ical” variant of the basic word, and vice versa; i.e. “maniacally”, not
> “maniacly”, is correct because “maniacal” is a word, while “agnosticly”,
> not “agnostically”, must be correct because "agnostical" is (arguably) not
> a real word. This logic is in doubt, since most if not all “-ical”
> constructions arguably are “real” words and most have certainly occurred
> more than once in “reputable” publications, and are also immediately
> understood by any educated reader of English even if they “look funny” to
> some, or do not appear in popular dictionaries. Additionally, there are
> numerous examples of words that have very widely-accepted extended forms
> that have skipped one or more intermediary forms, e.g.
> “disestablishmentarian” in the absence of “disestablishmentary”. At any
> rate, while some US editors might consider “-ally” vs. “-ly” to be
> pleonastic in some cases, the vast majority of other English speakers would
> not, and many “-ally” words are not pleonastic to anyone, even in American
> English.
> 

“pleonasm [5]”

In other words, we're both correct. “And this is why I love English,” she
said.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/02/16.1
[2] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=maniacly&btnG=Google+Search
[3] http://www.answers.com/topic/morpheme
[4] http://www.answers.com/topic/linguistic-
[5] http://www.answers.com/topic/pleonasm#wpcontent

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.