"Eeyore" wrote in message
...


Keith G wrote:

"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:36:20 +0000, Eiron wrote:

Don Pearce wrote:

The word "grammatic" isn't even in Merriam-Webster online. In
Dictionary Online it is given the meaning "of or pertaining to
grammar", which is not the usage we had here, which was of the
correct
use of grammar - the word for which is grammatical.

The OED has no entry for grammatic.

Mine does, and that's just the Shorter OED.
When I'm feeling really pedantic I cycle seven miles to the public
library to consult the full 24 volume edition.

Quite so. But grammatic and grammatical mean two quite different
things. You can talk about the grammatic structure of a sentence, but
if you are discussing the correctness of that structure, the word is
grammatical.

No, they mean exactly the same. It is just that there are times when to
use
one suits the situation/context (in 'High English'??) better than the
other.
Common with words ending 'ic' - spheric/spherical, symmetric/symmetrical
are
two other examples which spring immediately to mind...

I query the very existence of the word grammatic in UK English.

The 'ical' ending seems most suitable here to convert a noun to an
adjective
e.g. farce, farcical but then again there's hyperbolic as opposed to
hyperbolical.

But why is it circle, circular ? And what noun does perpendicular come
from ?


Perpend.

See more he

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/perpend


Isn't English fun ?



It was, but only because the English teacher (100+ year-old 'school card')
usually/mostly digressed into Classical History for entire lessons and
managed to teach us absolutely SFA about *English* per se - not bad going
for a 400 year-old 'Grammar School', eh?

But that didn't matter. As anyone will tell you, Latin is more important to
learning 'good English' than an 'English teacher' - that was less fun
because both of the teachers I had for the subject were actually ******* -
the first in a 'ditsy/dreamy' way (but a very nice bloke and a very good
cricket umpire), the second (Katherine Whitehorn's father) was just a
disinterested old git (also 100+) only concerned with picking up a few
shekels for attending....