Terry Hancock wrote: > On Friday 07 October 2005 03:01 am, Steve Holden wrote: > >>OK, so how do you account for the execresence "That will give you a >>savings of 20%", which usage is common in America? > > > In America, anyway, "savings" is a collective abstract noun > (like "physics" or "mechanics"), there's no such > noun as "saving" (that's present participle of "to save" > only). How did you expect that sentence to be rendered? > Why is it an "execresence"? > Precisely because there *is* such a thing as a saving. If I buy a $100 gumball for $80 I have achieved a saving of 20%.
> By the way, dict.org doesn't think "execresence" is a word, > although I interpret the neologism as meaning something like > "execrable utterance": > > dict.org said: > >>No definitions found for 'execresence'! > > Nonetheless, Google finds 369 hits for "execrescence" and 67 for "execresence". My Complete Oxford is still packed in a cardboard box, so I can't offer any more convincing evidence. If there isn't such a word, all I can say is there *ought* to be :-) regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
