Talk:ubicate

The senses of the English verb ubicate
I felt a bit bad about de-listing on WT:WE, hence the work I've done on  and. I think you're right that there's some usage which pretty much just means "to locate", and that some of this usage is non-standard, written by Hispanophones with an imperfect command of English (where ubicate is calqued from the Spanish ). However, there is some earlier philosophical-cum-theological usage that is independent of that, and which I haven't really got a hang on yet (for the same sense, see the seventeenth-century citations of ubication, s.v.); in this usage, the verb may be a back-formation from ubication, or it may come directly from a Latin source. (I've seen b.g.c. hits for forms of the Latin that are dated pre-1644.) Apart from them, The Century Dictionary helped me to divine the sense of the 1934 citation of ubicating, which sense I've now added to the entry for ubicate. Does any of that help at all? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:33, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * No worries about removing it from WT:WE; I hadn't noticed the bit about 'red links only' until you pointed it out, but if makes sense. "Locate" was just my guess as to the meaning, based on the sentence I initially encountered it in, and the Google Books hits, which I presume are the same ones you saw, which said it was a Hispanophonic error for "locate". If the definition or context I added is wrong, please do remove or correct it. The work I initially encountered the word in was by Paul Proulx, who ironically pooh-poohs technical jargon earlier, but then praises a book for containing "a great deal of information in a relatively few pages. The introduction begins by ubicating the Desano people and providing a very brief set of ethnographic comments. They live on the Vaupés river in Colombia..." The copy I was reading is on scribd, but the original is durably archived: Review of Desano Grammar: Studies in the Languages of Colombia 6, in the International Journal of American Linguistics, 69, pages 100-102 (2003). Outstanding job sprucing up the entry on ubication! Does there seem to be any connotative or denotative difference between ubicate and locate? - -sche (discuss) 22:10, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I think you're pretty much right with the definition you added, but that's only one of three (or perhaps more) senses. I found a helpful work that discusses the Latin ubicātiō (whence the English ubication), which I've cited at (q.v. for partial elucidation of the philosophical sense). Thanks for the compliment about ubication, but TBH I did little more than copy the NED’s entry; there's still a lot of work to be done on it. Proulx's use seems just to mean "locating", unless ubicate has a technical meaning in ethnography or whatever; it does look like a bit of unnecessary jargon (cf., later in that paragraph, the somewhat more justifiable ). I can't yet tell you what the "connotative or denotative difference[s] between ubicate and locate" are; more quotation gathering as well as comparing the usage of the Latin  and its descendants, including their equivalent verbs, should help gradually to make clear the meanings of these words. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:53, 19 July 2014 (UTC)