Timeline for What is the adjectival form of "nemesis"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 12, 2012 at 13:09 | comment | added | Kris | @tchrist +1 for "super-basic" | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 18:58 | comment | added | Robusto | @tchrist: Umm, success in limbo dancing? | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 18:48 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @Robusto初夢 "Pedantic"? Hello? Don’t use dem furrin words if you don’t like how they work. I work in the medical sciences doing computational linguistics, and I quite assure you that everyone there knows about -esis > -etic. It’s very basic to all of them. Some whom I asked weren’t even native English speakers, and they got it, too. It’s true that almost everyone I asked holds advanced degrees, but that also happens to be how my family, friends, and colleagues pan out. It is perfectly representative of that set, as I previously indicated. Nothing was ever achieved by aiming low. | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 16:29 | comment | added | Robusto | @tchrist: I just did my own grandmother survey and got results that contradict yours. Shows you the value of small sample sizes. But check out this NGram comparison of the two. You can see that the usage of nemetic is obscure, pedantic, and vanishingly small by comparison with nemesis. | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 14:14 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @Robusto初夢 I took you up on checking whether ‘most reasonably intelligent would understand it readily, if at all.’ I asked a dozen family, friends, and colleagues if they could figure out what it meant using the Abram citation. Some knew immediately that it was connected to nemesis, while others took more time but still less than half a minute; only 3 of them gave up and tried to guess based on context, which they indeed managed. If you grant that my sample set were ‘reasonably intelligent’, then I’ve disproved your thesis. You’ll also see I’ve brought my citation count up to 8 in my answer. | |
| Jan 9, 2012 at 19:42 | comment | added | Robusto | @tchrist: I'm sure you hang around with an educated crowd who are not a representative sampling of English speakers. I still believe that even most reasonably intelligent people would not understand it readily, if at all. | |
| Jan 9, 2012 at 18:19 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @Robusto初夢 Why should proper nouns have a different inflectional morphology? Timmy > Timmies, Sally > Sallies, Hermes > hermetic, Styx > Stygian, Iris > iridic, Venus > venereal, Eros > erotic, Herperus > Hesperides, Fides > fidelity, Medusa > medusae (meaning the cnidarian), Nox > nocturne, Pollux > pollucite. Clearly, a proper name still inflects normally. As for who would understand nemetic in that context, perhaps you should ask that of David Abram, per my citation below. Certainly any of my own friends and colleagues would instantly understand it. | |
| Jan 9, 2012 at 17:46 | comment | added | Robusto | @tchrist: Ordinarily that's true (mimesis => mimetic, etc.), but nemesis is derived from a proper name (the Greek goddess Nemesis), and as such is more fixed. Who would understand nemetic used in that context? | |
| Jan 9, 2012 at 17:22 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | I don’t mind your offered workarounds, but why would you say there’s no graceful way to change an -esis word into an adjective? That’s just not true. -esis > -etic. This is super-basic inflectional morphology. | |
| Jan 9, 2012 at 16:25 | comment | added | Lynn | +1 for the latter. There may be a grammatical adjective to "nemesis" but I would never use it :) | |
| Mar 3, 2011 at 3:45 | vote | accept | oosterwal | ||
| Jul 30, 2012 at 20:51 | |||||
| Mar 2, 2011 at 21:15 | comment | added | lotsoffreetime | The latter, just to be certain. | |
| Mar 2, 2011 at 18:43 | history | answered | Robusto | CC BY-SA 2.5 |