A question.

[Alex Martelli]

"Ben Wolfson" <wolfson at midway.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:jMAZ5.170$x3.2004 at uchinews...
> In article <916cd20b3b at news1.newsguy.com>,
> Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > [I don't wink, I don't adverbialize, I iconize
> >only very occasionally, the polysyllabic eruditeness of my hallmark
>                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^
> >circumlocutions pushes my Gunning Fog AND my Flesch-Kincaid up
> >in the high 20's -- what more could I do to shew hostility...?]
>
> *Surely* you mean "erudition"!

Abso-bloody-lutely not, o Ben.  Why use a relatively common
9-letter word when a perfectly correct 11-letter synonym of
it, that is used much more rarely, offers itself?  Hey,
'eruditeness' gets 68 Google hits in all (including those
in Merriam-Webster's Online Collegiate Thesaurus, American
Heritage, etc, which just serve to proclaim it as a fully
correct and legitimate synonym for 'erudition'), while your
preferred 'erudition' get 46.600 -- talk about hoi polloi!

Glad I landed a nicely-sized fish with this one.  I was
rather betting on 'shew', though -- doesn't it just _look_
like a typo?-)


Alex