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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hello!
I’m completely new to the Forum and tried searching to see if anyone had posted this particular pet peeve of mine previously. It drives me insane when people use the word “supposably” when they mean “supposedly.” I suppose I’ll have to grant that supposably is just as legitimate as supposedly and get over my personal issue with this word. Does this one irk anyone else?
Thank you and best wishes!
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Welcome to the forum, mindxpandr. This has been contributed to the forum a number of times, but it’s not an eggcorn. An eggcorn has to employ imagery different from that used by the original word. “Supposedly” and “supposably” are both based on “to suppose,” so there’s no switch of imagery involved. The founder of the Eggcorn Database—Chris Waigl—offers a pretty good analysis of “supposably” in this thread: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=19
Searching can be a little tricky on this site. If you click on “”Search” in the bar at the top of this page, you’ll get another page with a box for “Keyword search.” Enter “supposably” there, and you’ll bring up all the instances of this reshaping on the forum itself. As another option, you can also click on “Eggcorn Database” at the top of this page. That will bring you to the Database homepage, and if you look to the right, you’ll see two search boxes. Enter “supposably” into the lower one (marked “Google Search”), and that will (supposively) bring up all the instances of the word on the entire site (i.e., not just the forum)—there are quite a few of them.
“Supposably” doesn’t irk me. As Chris said in the post I mentioned above, ”+edly” and ”+ably” are both among the options that English has for turning a verb into an adverb, and it’s pretty understandable that people would get them confused. The fact that “supposedly” is standard and “supposably” non-standard is more or less an accident of lexical history; their positions could have been reversed. And in fact “presumably”—a word somewhat similar in meaning to “supposedly”—took the other path, and it may be the template on which “supposably” is based.
I find it interesting that people who apparently don’t know that “supposably” is non-standard in formal prose do seem to have an accurate sense of the range of endings that are appropriate to this kind of situation. If they were shooting for formal, standard English, then they did get the specifics wrong. But that error in itself reveals a subconscious awareness of the range of patterns by which our language forms adverbs from verbs.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-08-11 14:53:44)
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