Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: How did the Spelling Police miss this one? | From | Steven Cole <> | Date | 23 Apr 2003 22:26:23 -0600 |
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On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 21:39, Johannes Ruscheinski wrote: > Also sprach Steven Cole: > >... > > The fix.canon script used was this: > > > > #!/bin/sh > > find . -name "*" | xargs grep -l cannonicalize | awk '{print "ex - ",$1," -c \"%s/cannonicalize/canonicalize/g|x\""}' | sh > > ... > Hi Steve, > > As far as I know there is no such words as "canonicalize" in the English > language. The proper word seems to be "canonize". Since I'm not a native > speaker please take my comment with a grain of salt.
Strictly speaking, you are probably right. According to this: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=canonize sense #2 would qualify "canonize". I took the position that the only person who could "canonize" anything is an elderly Polish fellow living in Rome. But I've been wrong before.
The tortured variant "canonicalize" has seen enough usage to warrant this related entry here: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0%2c%2csid9_gci841392%2c00.html
As far as "no such words" go, a descriptive grammar is generally more useful for human languages than a prescriptive grammar. Healthy human languages allow for growth. See Tao Te Ching 76. (late night rambling)
Steven "verbalizing in his native language, where nouns and adjectives can be verbed" Cole
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