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James Hogg - 16 Jan 2009 10:32 GMT

I wrote before that the OED has no example of this adverb
after 1440.

Now I have found later uses of the word, thanks to Google Books
-- an outstanding tool for probes of this kind.

It was used by John Hazelrigg in 1916: "Our creeds deal
unletteredly and ungenerously with fundamental edicta"

It was also considered frequent enough to be included in an
encyclopaedic English--Serbo-Croat dictionary in 1956, where
it is glossed as "bez preservativa".

James

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Marius Hancu - 16 Jan 2009 13:14 GMT

> Now I have found later uses of the word, thanks to Google Books
> -- an outstanding tool for probes of this kind.

Yes, searches at Google Books with

word dictionary

will show you lots of related dictionaries containing the word.

Same for:

word slang
verb phrasal
"write your idiom here" idiom

Marius Hancu

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jerry_friedman@yahoo.com - 16 Jan 2009 16:18 GMT

> I wrote before that the OED has no example of this adverb
> after 1440.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> It was used by John Hazelrigg in 1916: "Our creeds deal
> unletteredly and ungenerously with fundamental edicta"

If that was the on-line OED, you could bring this quotation to their
attention.

> It was also considered frequent enough to be included in an
> encyclopaedic English--Serbo-Croat dictionary in 1956, where
> it is glossed as "bez preservativa".

It is insufficiently appreciated that Serbo-Croat (more properly
Croat) "preservativa" is a false cognate, and actually means "allow",
with an implied feminine singular direct object.

--
Jerry Friedman

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CDB - 16 Jan 2009 16:57 GMT

[unletterings]

>> It was also considered frequent enough to be included in an
>> encyclopaedic English--Serbo-Croat dictionary in 1956, where
>> it is glossed as "bez preservativa".

> It is insufficiently appreciated that Serbo-Croat (more properly
> Croat) "preservativa" is a false cognate, and actually means
> "allow", with an implied feminine singular direct object.

I was thinking it must mean "relating to former Yugoslavia"; unless
that's "broz presrvativa".

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Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

Unletteredly