Sunday, September 14, 2014

Correction in Quinion's Newsletter

The following correction was made in Quinion's newsletter. Unfortunately, he didn't correct his entry on his Web site: "Epicaricacy. Nancy Spector of the Wordcraft website pointed out that I was wrong to say the word epicaricacy doesn’t appear in any of Nathan Bailey’s dictionaries. It is included in An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 but in the spelling epicharikaky. Ammon Shea, whom I doubted in my piece, tells me it’s also in John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language of 1775 and in A Dictionary of the Synonymous Words and Technical Terms in the English Language by James Leslie of 1806, both in the same spelling as in Bailey’s. The word appears several times in various works in the original Greek spelling; a writer on the Wordcraft site found it a century before Bailey in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. It was familiar to Burton and other Greek scholars because Aristotle had used it."

2 comments:

seanahan said...

I would tend to trust Ammon Shea on lexicographical matters, just in terms of sheer number of hours spent reading dictionaries. Unless the OED drove him quite mad, which is always a real possibility.

Anonymous said...

Sorry - I made a mistake in the comment above, but couldn't figure out how to edit it, so I deleted it and am starting over.

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