Comments on: repropriate

By: Another round of repropriation « Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Another round of repropriation « Arnold Zwicky's Blog — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 04:48:34 +0000

[...] the last installment, we looked at an example of a verb repropriate intended to convey ‘reproduce, [...]

By: pxsarkany

pxsarkany — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:23:41 +0000

Right. My thought was that the speaker was thinking about sex, and reproduction together, so that “copulate” might have been on their mind, even though it is not appropriate semantically.

By: RF

RF — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:19:32 +0000

What about “repopulate”? It gets that second “p” in, and does have roughly the right semantic meaning. I know we can probably play this game forever, but this was definitely the first word I thought of.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:01:45 +0000

That just makes me frumious. (P.S. I think you’re probably right.)

By: arnold zwicky

arnold zwicky — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:34:13 +0000

Copulate is not at all a good fit semantically, because the point for the anti-same-sex-marriage folks is that while same-sex couples can copulate (engage in sex), they can't reproduce (engage in *productive* sex).

By: pxsarkany

pxsarkany — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:16:47 +0000

I’d also suggest adding “copulate” to the list. It’s not entirely accurate in that situation either, but I imagine it’s not far from their mind.

By: Éamonn McManus

Éamonn McManus — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 06:32:42 +0000

“Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first.” It seems to me that squishing together reproduce and procreate would be enough, but We May Never Know.