What does missiness mean? Another of them there furrin’ words?
If anyone tried to play these in a friendly game of scrabble, I would cut off their right hand to teach them a lesson, OED or not.
The state of being a Miss, duh. Archaically contrasted with missusness, but nowadays both being supplanted by mizziness.
Not to be confused with misterness. Unless that’s your kink, I’m not judging.
Even roed? It’s in all the major dictionaries, too. Even M-W.
Sorry, missiness is going onto my hand cutting off list. Is it South African usage? If so, I may have to cut it some slack, so to speak. Google and Discourse tell me missiness or mizziness are both misspelled words.
Roed is right out, it doesn’t make the Scrabble dictionary.
No, it’s just English. It’s how English works. Kids can be made to understand the principle. You start with Miss. Then something can be missy (which Discourse is fine with, FYI). Then you make missiness.
And the “Scrabble dictionary” is not the be-all and end-all of what words exist. It makes M-W and the OED, and furthermore even if it didn’t, follows the pattern of how we make those kinds of words to a T.
Roe->roed is no different than speckle->speckled or pimple->pimpled. It doesn’t need to be in the dictionary to work as a valid word.
Do you not grok how language works?
Oh, and…
Yet I’m sure you’ve memorized all the obscure 2-letter Scrabble words like qi and xu…
I checked Encarta and American Heritage, since they were close to hand. Neither has roed. Moreover, both have “roe” only as a noun. As does my original source, dictionary.com.
Now, it’s possible to verb nouns so that by extension “roed” becomes a potential word. But potential words are not yet words. Dmitri Borgmann, whose books I mentioned above, did too much of this. He even included foreign words, proper names, and made-up words from fiction to fill out a list. A game isn’t a game if it has no rules at all.
Therefore, the objection to having the official Scrabble dictionary be the arbiter of what is acceptable in Scrabble is just too silly to bother to refute.
I wasn’t talking about what’s acceptable in Scrabble. You said “not even in Scrabble”, not “in Scrabble”. But roed is perfectly acceptable just as a standard English adjectival construction.
If it’s good enough for M-W, Collins, Oxford and Wiktionary, it’s good enough for me.
No, it certainly is not American English. You can make up words all you want but until other people start using the word it does not matter. I’m willing to hazard a guess that the vast majority of Americans, Canadians and UK folk have never heard or seen the word missiness.
It is when I was talking about words in scrabble. Follow the plot, please. Children can learn how to read for comprehension.
Words generally are in popular use before they make it into the dictionary, not the other way around. I fail how it can be a valid word if no one has ever heard it used before.
Yes, I do, and this is a condescending and insulting way for you to converse. If you can’t make your argument without assuming people that don’t agree with you don’t understand the subject, maybe you should rethink your position.
No, I haven’t, because most people play scrabble for fun, not to use obscure words that no one else knows or uses.
The adjective + -ness suffix construction works just as well in American English as it does in any other variant.
That’s irrelevant. It follows a perfectly common rule for nouning adjectives.
Already dealt with this non-argument from E_M.
Pot, meet Kettle…
Because English has methods of constructing word variants from other roots and common suffixes and prefixes. Like I said, it’s something even kids can be taught.
…or else someone will (“jokingly”) threaten to chop their hand off. Yeah, that sounds like my idea of “for fun”…
Also, “no one else” is covering all of Vietnam and China, there…
Not in this case it doesn’t. If it did people would use missiness. They don’t. Missiness is not a word in US, ever. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I have ever heard the word missy except in very old movies/TV.
It’s not irrelevant. Just because you can make another form of a word does not mean it happens for every word.
Dealt with in your own mind, maybe. I was specifically talking about the use of words in Scrabble so I think the Scrabble Dictionary is pretty on point.
Well, when someone can only argue with insults, sometimes that’s all they understand.
But not all words. Something we do teach our kids, that is why nobody in the US has ever used the word missiness. It has absolutely no meaning in our language or, I suspect, most other forms of English.
See, this is another example of you not understanding how English works outside of your little bubble.
I have no idea what this means. Are you saying Vietnam and China are English speaking countries? My whole point in this thread is about English speaking countries.
Kn*ckers.
“She never had any missiness, any false or mawkish prudery.” —A Puritan Pagan: A Novel, by American novelist Julien Gordon, 1891
Google Books turns up at least a dozen more uses of the word in British literature, sometimes by authors that are famous enough to be read in America.
Did you notice the date? 120 years ago. Sorry if my post was unclear. We, or at least I, were speaking of current usage, I meant missiness is not a word in the US today, ever. As in today it never happens, ever.
Yeah, keep moving those goalposts. Eventually you’ll find some carefully chosen set of conditions under which you’ve won the argument.
Dude, go back and read my posts. They are all about now, I never said a word about archaic usage. If you can’t make an argument on my actual posts, maybe you should abstain or find someone that is actually talking about archaic words. Don’t blame your lack of ability to follow a thread on me.
Moderator Instruction
I would not have expected a simple thread about letter substitution to get a couple of our users at each other’s throats, but since this thread has somehow managed that, I am officially instructing @mordecaiB and @MrDibble to no longer post in this thread.
For everyone else, let’s get back to the original topic, please.