Why isn't Programmatically a word?
Asked by
Lasker (
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)
October 24th, 2009
Why isn’t programmatically a word? It is very useful. I feel the need to use it all the time whenever I explain to end-users that this can be done with a automated program that I write. Or when you speak to a technical person, ‘did you extract the data programmatically or manually?’
See how userful? Grrr
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14 Answers
You could submit it to the dictionary! That’d be cool. (:
Of course it’s a word. Just because your idiotic spell-checker flagged it doesn’t mean it’s not a word.
Some other words often missed by spell checkers:
absorptive (opposite of reflective)
recuse (for some reason not in FF’s spellcheck)
traveller (two l’s, part of a ship and a theatre, not one who travels)
If you think it’s useful, just use it. If it catches on, it is now a word.
People who write dictionaries don’t decide what is a proper word and what is not. The language community does. They only write it down.
Dictionarily, I notice that anyone can make up anything. (Or should that be “Dictionary-wise”?)
No hyphen in dictionarywise.
Contrariwise. Rules are delivered to me by the Cosmos as needed.
I expected you to counter that it needed an i instead of the y.
@Jeruba: Milo’s view, and one I consider reasonable, is that if we’re going to invent words, what difference does spelling make, spellingwise?
With all due respect, @gailcalled, and with infinite deference toward beloved Milo, I do not take my spelling guidance from a cat.
Verbal inventions, extrapolations, and improvisations require a certain logic. They’re not random. They might be Greek- or Latin-based neologisms, resurrections of archaisms, analogs to accepted words, anglicized imports, and a whole lot of other things. The orthography of the word reflects its structure and its history. Where there is an existing pattern, the word should follow it.
The established -wise words, with the suffix meaning “manner” or “way” (clockwise, lengthwise, edgewise, etc.), are not hyphenated. So when we create a new one, we make it look like it belongs to the set, and that gives it verisimilitude.
@Jeruba: You are the wisest of us all, wisewise. That was a magnificient mini-explication.
This thread has speedwise become doubleplus-unserious.
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