Some of these are whimsical and unlikely to be taken up as standard usage. Others are plain common sense. It is up to the user to discern the one from the other.
- arrove: past tense of ‘arrive’
- migratious (say it out loud): adjective form of ‘migrate’.
- in accord with: the non-redundant form of ‘in accordance with’
- table of content: There’s no need to append an ‘s’. It is an index of the content of a piece of literature.
- “…by dint of…” is an elegant, fun-to-say phrase we should use far oftener than we do.
- Oftener is a one-word, perfectly legitimate and correct way of saying “more often”.
- Good intent or best of intent are non-redundant ways of saying “good intention” or “best of intentions”: photographs of beam patterns are misleading even if we assume the photographer’s best intent; I’m sure Jim had good intent, but that ice-breaker thing he tried to start at lunch was ridiculous.
- Inbuilt: An unhyphenated, elegant way of saying “built-in”. Utterly common in UK and Australian English, this is a much better solution than “built-in”, which is comparatively clumsy and ugly. This model works for verbs other than “build”, too: a corn muffin with an inbaked (rather than baked-in) hardboiled egg, for example.
- Import (noun): The non-redundant version of “importance” and of “importation”. There’s no connotative or denotative difference, but the long forms contain unwarranted syllables and needn’t have been coined. Regrettably they were, but that doesn’t oblige us to use them.
- Prepone: To pull (as a meeting, event, or appointment) closer in time. It’s the opposite of postpone. This comes to us from the English speakers of India, who are as likely to prepone next month’s meeting to this week as to postpone this week’s meeting to next month.
- Inceed: The opposite of exceed: to measure, remain, or accumulate to a degree less than some particular amount or number. It’s useful for avoiding the confusion that arises when we say, for example, that a new car “exceeds” the latest emission standards by 37%. It’s reasonably clear from context that we mean it’s 37% cleaner than it has to be, but the sentence construction denotes a vehicle 37% dirtier than it’s allowed to be, so it’s 100% clearer to say the new car inceeds the latest emission standards by 37%.
- Burgle: What a burglar does. The Americanism “burglarize” is redundant and dumb. Isn’t that just the most hystericalisticalistically funny thing?
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