Thursday, October 14, 2010

There Must Be a Problem With the Language

Why we hate ‘gubernatorial’ - The Boston Globe:
One obvious reason is that Americans had increasing numbers of state governors, and thus of elections in need of an adjective. As early as 1848, John Russell Bartlett, in ”Americanisms,” listed gubernatorial among words ”whose origin has grown out of our peculiar institutions, and which consequently are of a permanent nature.” (Caucus, lobby, mileage, and bunkum also made his list.) If the British had shared our need for gubernatorial, they too might have kept it current. But this commonsense analysis seems to have eluded the mavens.
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