11.29.02

Re-rereviewed

Posted in Online memory at 4:11 pm by

I’m not particularly exercised by what “rereviewed” means. I think it’s fairly obvious. But I am slightly surprised that it’s not in the OED 2nd ed. There’s a semantic space on the page between “rereveal” (to reveal again) and “rerevise” (to revise again). It’s not as if nobody else has ever used the word.

The word “rereview” is of a limited semantic interest, but, finally, “re-” can always be used to mean “again” (as in the above two examples), so even a term such as “rereturn” has a simple meaning (”to return again”) rather than being puzzling (”to return back?”, “to return away?”). Hence, “rereview” parses just as “to review again” - depending on what you mean by “review”, of course.

What set me off on this? Just that I wanted to link to Andy L’s post on an old catalogue of Masonic practical jokes. Then I realised there’s a link back here in the post. That’s more than just incestuous blogging, surely. Won’t it break the Internet?

(Hmm. That train of thought made sense right up until the moment I tried to explain it. Thank goodness I didn’t try to include the bit about Phil K. Dick and real fakes.)

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