Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 13:50:33 -0500
From: Alan Beale
To: Kevin Atkinson

I've gone through your list of differences and updated 2of12id.txt
appropriately, I hope.  Your list of differences exposed that some of them
were in fact wrong, representing changes that should not have been made to
2of12inf.  The next time I release 12dicts, I will correct these.  (Let me
know if you think it highly desirable that I release one immediately due to
these errors.)  Here is my commentary on all the entries which were not
straightforward:

escaloped, escaloping - These words should not have been removed.

meds - This word should not have been added, as "med" is not listed.  I
believe this is a thoughtless edit resulting from the presence of "med" in
the 2of4brif list.

metred, metring - These words should not have been removed.

narced, narcing - This is very difficult.  One of my source dictionaries
lists "narc" as a verb.  I think it's wrong - every other source I've seen
shows the verb as "nark".  To make it worse, the dictionary that lists the
verb "narc" neither lists inflections, nor shows an inflected usage.  Its
regular inflections ought to be "narcked" and "narcking", not "narced" and
"narcing".  However, the Google n-gram data I purchased shows no uses at all
of the -ck- forms, but a few of the -c- forms.  It is hard to know whether
to take the verb "narc" out of 2of12id, or to put the inflections back into
2of12inf.  In the realm of spelling checking, it is almost certainly best
for "narced" and "narcing" not be present in the dictionary.  I've rather
reluctantly marked the entry for "narc V:" with a "-", as being the result
that works out best for most users of the list.

weaselled, weaselling - These inflections are not shown, as far as I can
tell, in my dictionaries.  But I have other sources for these forms,
including a bigger dictionary by a publisher of one of my sources which
lists the word.  You could argue this either way, but since I'm sure that
these spellings exist, I'm going to be inclusive and remove the hyphens from
the "weasel V:" entry in 2of12id.

I'm attaching my edited 2of12id.txt.  Feel free to argue with me about any
of my conclusions.  And thanks for calling these errors to my attention
(even if you didn't realize that was what you were doing).


Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 06:39:18 -0500
From: Alan Beale

Friday, January 9, 2009, 1:34:49 AM, Kevin Atkinson wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Alan Beale wrote:

> Thank you for the updated file, I have a few questions on your entries:

> You changed:
>    -nett N: netts
>    -nett V: netted  netting  netts
> to
>    nett N: netts
>    nett V: netted  netting  netts

> All my dictionaries point to nett as a British variant of net.  However
> the Compact Oxford English Dictionary only marks it as a variant for the
> verb form only, see
> http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/net_2?view=uk. 
> Do you have any evidence nett is used as a noun.

net (2) is also a noun, an abbreviated form of "net profit" or "net income".

Shorter OED makes this explicit.  "Gross income of these companies
improved last year, but their netts are still in decline."  (That's my
sentence, not the SOED's.)

> You added:
>    antiviral N: antivirals
> What evidence do you have that antiviral is a noun?

American Heritage dictionary (CD ROM).

> Why did you change:
>    syrup N: ~syrups
> to
>    syrup N: syrups

Common sense.  This seems to be a minority opinion, but I claim a
usage like "Our pancake house offers twenty-eight different syrups" is
not in any way unusual.  The Macmillan Dictionary for Advanced
Learners backs me up on this.
