According to World Wide Words, the original usage was “barefaced lie.” Americans started using “bald-faced lie” in the late nineteenth century. There’s also “boldfaced lie,” which goes back almost as far as “barefaced lie.”
In fact, they appear to be simply variant spellings, with equally long history and identical etymology. Some U.S. dictionaries claim that “stanch” is more common for the verb, but that isn’t supported by Google ngram which has “staunch the flow” slightly ahead of “stanch the flow”. For the adjective, “stanch” was always uncommon and seems to have died out completely in favor of “staunch” in the last few decades
I have always used “staunch” for both adjective and verb (British English), but I’m not sure that it’s a British/American difference. What’s your basis for claiming that one spelling of the verb is a “mistake”? Based on you putting “descriptivist” in scare quotes, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a wild guess that you don’t have any basis for that claim?
Leo, you often seem to have interesting things to say, but I think I’m not alone in being unable to decipher what you mean much of the time. Are you saying here that German is your native language?
I think “luck”, all by itself, has positive implications, although it’s not absolute. Certainly, you wouldn’t describe yourself as “lucky” if you just meant “things often happen to me due to random chance”, it clearly means “GOOD things often happen to me by random chance”. And if you say “I guess we need some luck here”, you again are hoping for a positive random outcome.
The fishing boat, overloaded with flounder, foundered.
The crew found themselves floundering among flounder to escape the foundering boat. Most were never found.
It’s easy to see why, surely. “Moot” is an obscure word. If somebody does not know the word, they may aurally mistake it for the more common “mute”. The meaning “not up for discussion” is very close to “something we keep quiet about”.
It is, and don’t call me Shurley. To my ear, moot and mute sound very different, but I get that moot is a bit obscure to anyone who doesn’t read a lot.
Among the greatest tragic moments of my educational life, was the day that I learned to my intense dismay, that dictionaries do not, in fact, have as a primary, or even secondary task, the establishment of any sort of authority over word spellings or meanings. They are merely repositories of our collective verbal crapulence (or is that supposed to be crapulAnce?).
Perhaps you are being sarcastic, but to me the it’s far more wonderful to realize that all of language arose spontaneously. It’s directly analogous to the wonderful revelation in 1859 that all of the beauty and design in nature arose through spontaneous natural processes. Evolution is far more interesting an inspirational than a “turtles-all-the-way-down” account, the “explanation” of a complex phenomenon as the creation of an unexplained more complex entity.
To my ear, moot and mute sound very different, but I get that moot is a bit obscure to anyone who doesn’t read a lot.