[..] > Same place I first encountered "aperature", "warrantee" used in place of > "warranty" and "loose" as the opposite of "find."
this one seems as an error I (as an Italian) could make, maybe the poster(s) was (were) non-english at all.. loose it's similiar to lose, the opposite of find, warrantee sounds like warranty (and it's similiar to the guarantee word. They also have similiar meanings, and the same ethymology*... moreover, in italian, for instance, the two words - warranty and guarantee - are translated into the same word: garanzia)... hey, it's not so easy to master a foreign language if you don't have a lot of opportunities to speak it with someone or to read it! > As a matter of fact, when I was in this heated discussion on a newsgroup > about "lense" a few years ago, there were American posters who said > "it's the British spelling" and non-Americans who assumed it was > American. This enforces my hypothesis... ;) > As I said at the time, having checked these multiple, > multinational sources, it is apparently neither British nor American but > just plain wrong. > Its appearance in a single dictionary source *since* that time suggests > to me its origin is misspelling finally recognized through sheer > persistence. if it's so, persistence has won, or at least it seems so. The two dictionaries I use report it: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=lense http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lense None of them, though, points out if it's a regional or new form of the word (the first reports it as a "variant"), yet they (quite) always report the word as "lens"... well, who cares?? ;) Danilo. * searching for the word ethymology (yes I have to check the spelling of almost every word I write) I've found this: For example, lord comes from hlaef weard, meaning "bread guard." wow!
