An editor at the desk the other day asked what should be the word to mean 'to cause something to happen earlier,' the reply was: to earlierise. The editor who asked the question seemed a bit sceptical of the existence of the word. An instant search on Google, with -ise, returned fewer than a hundred instances and with -ize, there were fewer than 150 instances; but none of the instances gave the meaning. Only an online dictionary said it was a transitive verb; but there was no meaning. Dictionaries at hand have not listed the verb. A search later in the 1968 edition of Chamber's Twentieth Century Dictionary showed 'earlierise, v.t. to do at a date earlier than that arranged.' The verb is back-formed, but a verb that is.
No comments:
Post a Comment