Pickwick the Dodo

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Posit This.

As my 1.5 faithful readers know, I'm a library school student by night. My classmates, though diverse, by and large subscribe to the "gosh, books and reading and writing and stuff are nifty!" school of thought. A great many of us (though not me) were English/Literature/History/Humanities majors in college. Typically, one might expect librarians to be smarter than the average bear in the whole Knowledge of the English Language sphere.

However, this appears not to have stopped a classmate of mine from remarking that when I used the word "posited" in a recent recap of a group discussion, I clearly must have meant "posted" because "posited" is not a word.

To wit:

pos·it
tr.v. pos·it·ed, pos·it·ing, pos·its
  1. To assume the existence of; postulate. See Synonyms at presume.
  2. To put forward, as for consideration or study; suggest: “If a book is hard going, it ought to be good. If it posits a complex moral situation, it ought to be even better” (Anthony Burgess).
  3. To place firmly in position.


[From Latin positus, past participle of ponere, to place. See position.]

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

I mean, I know that I'm prone to dime-word syndrome, but please - this word is not a hard one. In fact, as a librarian-to-be, you should have a dictionary at home and you should use it, a lot, because it's basic freakin' reference. Hell, you could take the two seconds I just did to bop on over to Dictionary.com and type it in. Nothing is more embarassing than a librarian who can't be bothered to look something up. After all, that's kind of our whole job description over here.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home