I've been working on a new art piece and had it hanging at one of several places I share my ideas in progress.
a friend walked by responding to its latest improvement of little beads hanging below, "ooh, it now has ejaculant."
"like coolant?" I replied.
after an awkward silence, he asked, "isn't that what it's called?"
umm ... I decided to go ahead. "well, it's e-jac-u-late," I enunciated each syllable, "not e-jac-u-lant." he looked at me dumbfounded, like I was speaking a different language and these two different sounds were not discernable to him. I tried again but I got the same look. we dropped it.
later I was relating the story to another male friend. I told him that someone had called it ejaculant. my friend looked at me, waiting for the punch line. I said, it's e-jac-u-late, not e-jac-u-lant. three times I repeated it, but same as the last guy, we got nowhere. his chemistry background prompted him to say it's just like precipitant. I said yeah, it IS just like precipitant, only the word is precipitate. after more online dictionary consultations, he finally agreed although loudly proclaimed that he liked ejaculant better and stomped off muttering something about how nouns and verbs should never be the same word.
just as I was going to post this, I decided to see how many other occurrences of this misspelled word there were. according to a google search today, there are 145,000 listings for ejaculant as compared to 1.8 million for ejaculate. seems it is a word fetus on its way to becoming a true individual word of its own someday, maybe, and the joke is on me.
a friend walked by responding to its latest improvement of little beads hanging below, "ooh, it now has ejaculant."
"like coolant?" I replied.
after an awkward silence, he asked, "isn't that what it's called?"
umm ... I decided to go ahead. "well, it's e-jac-u-late," I enunciated each syllable, "not e-jac-u-lant." he looked at me dumbfounded, like I was speaking a different language and these two different sounds were not discernable to him. I tried again but I got the same look. we dropped it.
later I was relating the story to another male friend. I told him that someone had called it ejaculant. my friend looked at me, waiting for the punch line. I said, it's e-jac-u-late, not e-jac-u-lant. three times I repeated it, but same as the last guy, we got nowhere. his chemistry background prompted him to say it's just like precipitant. I said yeah, it IS just like precipitant, only the word is precipitate. after more online dictionary consultations, he finally agreed although loudly proclaimed that he liked ejaculant better and stomped off muttering something about how nouns and verbs should never be the same word.
just as I was going to post this, I decided to see how many other occurrences of this misspelled word there were. according to a google search today, there are 145,000 listings for ejaculant as compared to 1.8 million for ejaculate. seems it is a word fetus on its way to becoming a true individual word of its own someday, maybe, and the joke is on me.
I wish this was a joke. Unfortunately, I know it isn't, and it must be jarring to find out they've used the wrong word all of these years. (for those who care, as opposed to those who cling to their "ejaculant")
One issue may be that it isn't a word most people commonly type, or use in work/school reports, so they never really see it in print or have it dinged by a spell checker.
well, gee, maybe we should work for change around that and encourage everyone to use any words they want in school, eh?
another thought - here's a researchy way to use the wayback machine. we could do a word census every 10 years to see how the use of a word has changed in frequency and see the birth and death of new words.
or maybe we should just call it jizz and be done with it ;-)