[quote author=Hektor6766 link=topic_id=1511&post_id=25350#rmsg_25350 date=1330577264]Oxford American Dictionary: [b]miniscule[/b]: mistaken spelling of [b]minuscule[/b]. Acknowledged, but still incorrect.[/quote]
Yeah, it just depends on where you look. Some reputable dictionaries have listed [miniscule] as a full-fledged alternate spelling/variant since the 1980s. Since there is no single, completely authoritative governing body for English (or Japanese, for that matter), I don't believe that situations such as this can be simplified to a right or wrong case. Language is not unlike a living organism when it comes to the incredible ways in which it constantly evolves. What is wrong today may become standard usage tomorrow - especially in a case like we are discussing where the "incorrect" usage has consistently kept pace with, if not in some instances outnumbered, the "accepted" form.
Since you mentioned the Oxford American Dictionary, have a look at this segment of an article written by Ben Zimmer for the Oxford University Press's blog:
[quote]Consider another more common case of vowel mixup. The word minuscule is etymologically related to minus, which ought to help with remembering the spelling. But pressure from the prefix mini- and words like miniature and minimum leads many people to spell the word as miniscule instead. This spelling has become so widespread, even in professional writing, that most current dictionaries list it as a variant. The New Oxford American Dictionary provides an entry for miniscule but calls it a “nonstandard spelling” and gives a usage note warning readers away from this “common error.”
Are we perhaps being too hard on miniscule? Lexicographers here at OUP can consult the Oxford English Corpus to see just how accepted this spelling has become. In our hardly minuscule collection of 21st-century written texts, the spelling miniscule actually outnumbers minuscule, by a ratio of about 55% to 45%. From the big all-encompassing Corpus we can extract smaller groups of texts, or subcorpora, to see exactly where the variant usage is coming from. Not surprisingly, the less standard spelling miniscule crops up more frequently in unedited writing. Focusing only on texts that we can identify as having been edited, the percentages are reversed, with 55% of writers preferring minuscule to 45% for miniscule. As for the unedited texts we’ve collected, there’s no contest: miniscule shows up a whopping 73% of the time.
If we’re finding a preference for miniscule over minuscule in nearly half of edited writing and nearly three-quarters of unedited writing, then it’s likely that we’ll need to reconsider the treatment of the miniscule variant in future editions of our dictionaries, in order to reflect its gradual acceptance across the range of English usage. This development is not new, by the way — according to the Oxford English Dictionary, miniscule has been appearing in published prose since the late 19th century, and gripes about the spelling have been aired in the popular press since at least the 1970s. Despite disapproving of miniscule, Garner’s Modern American Usage acknowledges its appearance in a variety of reputable publications, from major newspapers to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (“Harry saw that the little square for June thirteenth seemed to have turned into a miniscule television screen”).
How you react to this sort of change in usage depends on your point of view. Linguistic purists would likely decry the popularization of a spelling variant like miniscule as just one more sign that English is on the slippery slope to oblivion. From another perspective, however, this is simply the way that language evolves. Personally, what I find most significant is that this orthographic change didn’t just come out of the blue. First, the usage of minuscule expanded from its original typographical sense referring to lower-case letters (as opposed to majuscule), eventually coming to refer to anything tiny or insignificant. That meant the miniscule spelling could be thought of as equally plausible, or even more plausible, because the ‘tiny, insignificant’ sense is a perfect match for the mini- prefix (even if the rest of the word, -scule, is not meaningful on its own).
Through associations with the whole class of mini-words, the miniscule spelling ends up making sense in a new way. And that’s the kind of semantic motivation we find again and again when words get reshaped in common usage. Next week I’ll take a look at how this same sort of motivation remakes idiomatic expressions once the original idioms start to fade away. A warning: it may offend the more straight-laced of our readers who expect English users to tow the line.[/quote]
I'm actually reading a fascinating book by Bill Bryson right now called [i]Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States[/i] which goes heavily into the evolution of American English from British English, starting with the original Plymouth Colony. It's amazing to see how many words that we use every day in American English are corruptions/misspellings of British English, Native American, Spanish, and French terms. To cite just one commonly-known example, the simple difference in spelling between [i]color[/i] and [i]colour[/i] was originally heralded as a grossly negligent error - until Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary featured only the [i]-or[/i] spelling for words such as [i]neighbor[/i], [i]rumor[/i], [i]flavor[/i], and [i]color[/i], setting the American standard for a whole slew of related vocabulary. Dictionaries are works of reference, but they can also be powerful agents of change.
