Agreeance
February 28, 2003
Boy is my face red. “Agreeance” is a word. It’s archaic, but apparently a word nonetheless. When I get back I’ll look it up in the local Oxford English Dictionary and let you know what I find.
Until then, sorry, Fred Durst. I have a lump in my throat, like a chump.
2/28 22:36: Just looked it up in volume one of the OED. I have independently verified that the OED considers “agreeance” a word. That’s good enough for me.
Posted in Speaking Very Slowly
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March 2nd, 2005 at 10:49 pm
It may be a word, but it is archaic and obsolete. It is an ‘unword’.
It is the bastardisation of Agreement.
March 3rd, 2005 at 3:52 am
Hmm. Who am I going to side with on this issue? Wardy? Or the OED and several hundred years of English history? Words don’t stop being words just because they’re old. Archaic it might be, but bastardiZation? Never!
PS: When will you English learn to spell properly? God made a ‘Z’ for a reason.
July 6th, 2005 at 11:46 am
It is sooth sith we are in agreeance in respect to Fred Durst, I hast a sweaven: agreeance not to use archaic words eke to the letter “z” in suffixes in a swoopstake. BTW, I am an American.
July 6th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
For those at home, Mike is saying (or at least, punctuation would help him say): “It is true. Since we are in agreement with respect to Fred Durst, I have a dream: an agreement not to use archaic words. Also, not to use the letter “z” in all suffixes indiscriminately.
Look. I said it really was a word, not that it was a good one. Sheesh.
October 11th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
I’ll use it just this once, seeing as you’re all pretty much agreed on agrreance. Here goes
July 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Agreeance is not moribund. It is simply not used as commonly today as it was centuries ago. Maybe only ‘intelligent’ people use the word nowadays. Just to add, agreeance is not a bastardisation of agreement, it’s the other way round. Secondly, ‘z’ has replaced ’s’ simply because Americans didn’t know how to spell 150 years ago. Hence, Websters - the dictionary for rednecks. I’ll stick to Dr. Johnson’s dictionary anytime.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Actually, the -ise suffix is the neologism. According to Wikipedia, the OED is pretty firmly against the -ise construction and didn’t even include it until recently. According to Oxford, the English standardiZation on -ise came after, not before, Websters. Prior to that, English accepted both spellings. Anyway, -ize looks more like its Greek ancestor (-izo) and is also phonetically correct.
Oxford also points out that the preference for -ise over -ize may be the result of lazy spelling more than anything else: if you force all such suffixes to be spelled -ise, you don’t have to remember that there are some that can’t be spelled -ize.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Maybe I stand corrected. Hence forth and read the ‘new’ dictionary, Wikipedia. Above all, we are both correct. I teach English as a second language to children in SE Asia. I accept both versions as some have have previous American English and others will go on to learn with American teachers.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I agree with Dennis. The -ise spellings were the original British spellings, though I don’t know any further back than that. The Americans changed the spellings of lots of words; that hardly makes them more correct. Frankly, before the first dictionaries, people were allowed to spell words however they liked! Look at Shakespeare–he spelled his own name in several different ways to suit his mood!
So alas, lighten up. It’s unbecoming and ungentlemanly to attack a person based on the way he so chooses to spell his words. After all it’s the message he/she is attempting to convey that is important, not the medium by which that occurs. English is the embodiment of change. If the Americans are allowed to change spellings to ‘z’ and take the ‘u’ out of words like colour, then who’s to say we can’t choose for ourselves how we should spell things, and for that matter what words we use.
All in agreeance? ;)
August 13th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
One more thought: technically, one could argue that there are (at least) two distinct thoughts corresponding to the current “accepted” use of the one word “agreement”, for which the addition of the word “agreeance” would actually be helpful in distinguishment:
Therefore I propose the use of the term “agreeance” to mean the state of having arrived at an agreement; that is, two people would be in agreeance, when an agreement has been achieved between them. You wouldn’t say “an agreeance”, nor would you say “in agreement”.