Dry Run
On the second Wednesday of every month, Salon.com publishes a stream of self-promotional, free-associating bafflegab by Camille Paglia, which, one would assume, they also pay her for. I can't imagine why.
On the second page of the letters to the editor for this month's column, someone called her a "dessicated harridan", which is hilarious. It's also misspelled, unfortunately.
I would imagine that the great majority of people can't spell "desiccated" properly, and it's hard to blame them. It's pronounced as if it ought to be spelled "dessicated", after all, and it's unexpected: there is only a tiny handful of English words that end in "-ccate", all of them uncommon ("Saccate", anyone? "Toccate"?)
Googling "dessicated" gives 271,000 hits, while "desiccated" gives 1.1 million, and I would bet you money that the only reason the first number is smaller than the second is that spellcheckers exist.
"Desiccate" comes from Latin "de-", an intensifier in this case, plus "siccus", "dry", which also gave us the French import "sec", "dry", as in the liqueur Triple Sec, and also "sack", which is an old name for a dry white wine.
The "-ate" in "desiccate", by the way, is a direct descendant of the Latin verb stem "-atus"; it is, of course, extremely common in English in such verbs as "estimate" and "intoxicate". The "-ate" in "toccate" is something else: not even a suffix, it's a standard Italian plural form for feminine words ending in "-ata", in this case of the singular "toccata". (Naturally, we prefer in English to pluralize "toccata" as "toccatas", but the naturalized Italian word does exist: it's just a lot rarer, not that "toccata" is that common to begin with, and if it were, everyone would spell it "tocatta".) And finally, the "-ate" in "saccate" is something else again, in this case an adjectival suffix, as in "immaculate" or "literate": it means "sac-shaped".
On the second page of the letters to the editor for this month's column, someone called her a "dessicated harridan", which is hilarious. It's also misspelled, unfortunately.
I would imagine that the great majority of people can't spell "desiccated" properly, and it's hard to blame them. It's pronounced as if it ought to be spelled "dessicated", after all, and it's unexpected: there is only a tiny handful of English words that end in "-ccate", all of them uncommon ("Saccate", anyone? "Toccate"?)
Googling "dessicated" gives 271,000 hits, while "desiccated" gives 1.1 million, and I would bet you money that the only reason the first number is smaller than the second is that spellcheckers exist.
"Desiccate" comes from Latin "de-", an intensifier in this case, plus "siccus", "dry", which also gave us the French import "sec", "dry", as in the liqueur Triple Sec, and also "sack", which is an old name for a dry white wine.
The "-ate" in "desiccate", by the way, is a direct descendant of the Latin verb stem "-atus"; it is, of course, extremely common in English in such verbs as "estimate" and "intoxicate". The "-ate" in "toccate" is something else: not even a suffix, it's a standard Italian plural form for feminine words ending in "-ata", in this case of the singular "toccata". (Naturally, we prefer in English to pluralize "toccata" as "toccatas", but the naturalized Italian word does exist: it's just a lot rarer, not that "toccata" is that common to begin with, and if it were, everyone would spell it "tocatta".) And finally, the "-ate" in "saccate" is something else again, in this case an adjectival suffix, as in "immaculate" or "literate": it means "sac-shaped".
posted by pyramus | 4:25 AM
2 Comments:
I only recently found this blog and I enjoy it immensely. I do not have good visual memory and my spelling suffers as a result but I do enjoy words. Your blog is perfect for those of us who just like words, sometimes for their sounds, sometimes for their ability to succintly convey an idea and sometimes just for the fun of it. Thank you!
And thank you! That's why I do it.
Post a Comment
<< Home