Talk:promogulate

RFD discussion: February–April 2024
I think this is what i call a motor memory typo, not a conscious blend of two words. A single attestation of the word spoken out loud would convince me otherwise, but I doubt we will find one, and absence of proof is not proof of absence, so I don't know what to do. The word already passes RFV inasmuch as it has three cites, but whether we have three cites or three hundred there is no way to prove that the intended sense is the one we list. Strong evidence against the cited sense would be if the same document spells it once this way and once as promulgate, but there are plenty of other cites for the blended spelling, so we would never really eliminate the claim that it's purposeful. What should we do? — Soap — 12:02, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Some other evidence I thought of against the claim we make:
 * The substring -gulate is fairly common in English, while -ulgate is only found in two words and their derivatives. This is the sort of situation that leads to motor memory typos.
 * The substring -gulate does not actually occur in the claimed parent word promulgate.
 * There is no obvious pronunciation for the blended word.
 * Best regards, — Soap — 12:05, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Good catch, this does look very much like e.g. (in the other direction, erroneously forgetting to type part of a word) son-law or precipation, the latter of which I can even find on Nasa webpages and in military handbooks (but tellingly, they all also use precipitation). All of the cites provided for promogulate use promogulat(e|es|ing|ed) only once, while making frequent use of promulgate, and for the 2005 cite, other editions have promulgate even in the one sentence where the 2005 edition has promogulate. Furthermore, I can't find any sources which e.g. gloss or explain the word, as I would expect someone to do it they were using a word that looks so much like a typo of promulgate but which they meant to have a completely different sense of promote + regulate. IMO it is clearly a typo in the cites provided, and probably in all cites, although spoken examples would be persuasive as you say. As it stands, I say we delete this. It was added by a good contributor, but even good contributors sometimes misidentify some new string of letters they've spotted as intentional new words when really they're typos; compare Talk:xyrophilic or recondit. - -sche (discuss) 13:43, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Can’t argue much against this. Fay Freak (talk) 14:10, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I am all too familiar, from personal experience, with motor memory typos. (Original coinage?) This certainly seems like one. DCDuring (talk) 16:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I'd say delete it unless it's a common misspelling (which seems unlikely). — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:45, 14 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Delete. Seems an extremely rare unintentional error. Equinox ◑ 11:08, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete per the above. PUC – 19:44, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Deleted. PUC – 19:45, 4 April 2024 (UTC)