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Just wanted to say that I think yesterday's "news" post may have come across as a little harsh toward "Wishydig", the blogger mentioned there. Particularly in referring to his "overzealous prescriptivism"; I've since read over more of his posts, and he is definitely not an overzealous prescriptivist. Moreover, I think I somewhat misrepresented him in saying that he recommended discontinuing the use of "anachronism" and replacing it with "metachronism" or "parachronism"—he did make the argument I cited about "ana-" not being an entirely appropriate prefix for that use, but he went on to say that he could see a justification for its use in "anachronism"; his suggestion of "meta-" and "para-" was for an analogous word referring to the wrong place. (Metachorism? Parachorism? Metatopism? Paratopism? Well, actually, a Google search shows the last two (but not the first two) already having been used, albeit very rarely; "Metatopism" appears in a handful of locations, but all but one result from an erroneous division of a Greek word (μετατοπισμένος); the one remaining is a paper about Oedipus that at first seems to be using it to mean a "geographical inconstistency"—which is essentially the meaning we are looking for—but then goes on to cryptically elaborate in a footnote that "[a]s the prefix 'meta-' connotes multiple meanings such as change, after, behind, among, with, and so on, metatopism involves much more than a simplified idea of substituting one place for another"—without ever specifying just what it is, then, that it does involve. (Interestingly, though, the footnote also raises Wishydig's point about the meaning of "ana-" vis-à-vis the word "anachronism". Possibly less interestingly, I think the sentence immediately preceding this one is the first time I have ever used the word "vis-à-vis") As for "paratopism", it has slightly more hits (but only slightly), being apparently an uncommon mathematical term for a conjugacy combined with an isotopism. (As for what exactly a conjugacy and an isotopism are... well, don't worry about it. This parenthetical comment (that is, the parenthetical comment that this one is nested within, or rather the parenthetical comment that the parenthetical comment that this one is nested within is nested within) has already become significantly longer than the rest of the paragraph.)) "Paratopism" (but none of the other three words) also appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, but as a nonce-word attested only in a single citation in 1851—where, however, it is explicitly advanced as a "word which will bear the same relation to place as anachronism does to time".)
Now, as it happens, I don't entirely agree with Wishydig that a word meaning "assigned to the wrong place" shouldn't use the prefix "ana-". Again, this argument is certainly etymologically defensible, but I think it's at least excusable to use that prefix for other similar words by analogy with the well-established "anachronism". Still, Wishydig makes a perfectly cogent argument, and it's not at all fair to accuse him of "overzealous prescriptivism".
As a matter of fact, as I said, I've been reading some of Wishydig's other posts, and there's a lot of good stuff there. If you're interested in language (which I am... heck, if I weren't, I wouldn't have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in the first place), Wishydig's blog offers a lot of illumination and entertainment—and, of course, there are links there to other blogs on the subject as well. I'd probably become a regular reader, and check out some of the other blogs he links to... if, you know, I didn't already have about ten thousand too many demands on my time. (One of which, of course, is getting the auto-update script working for the strip, which I still haven't gotten around to... not to mention redoing the hard-to-read fonts...) As it is, I may still drop by from time to time...
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