🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8200@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt) writes:
>
>And not only that.  If ignorant people start using "ascribe" to mean
>"subscribe," and no one corrects them, then we'll have two different 
>words with the same meaning, while we lose the word "ascribe" as meaning 
>what it means today.  Not only is that a dumb thing to let happen, it's
>also anti-English.

I watched "convince" take on the sense of (or lose its distinction from)
"persuade" right before my eyes (starting in the Oakland Tribune) from the
late fifties through the early sixties.  Although, stubborn old fogey that I
am, I have yet to join the crowd, I don't think there are a whole lot of
people who use "persuade" much anymore.
    Yet the syntax and context always reveal when "convince" means "persuade"
and when it "really" means "convince," and when I studied French, their
cognates were taught to me as synonyms.  It seems a harmless change, and
"persuade" is perhaps unnecessary baggage.

Would the case be much different with "...scribe"?  It's pretty clear that
ascribing to a belief and ascribing to a magazine would be different.  In
fact, it would be a linguistic (as opposed to a social(?)) problem only when
one couldn't tell that the "wrong" word had been used.

Can anyone think of a case where replacing "subscribe" with "abscribe" comes
out sounding right?

Bart Mathias