NaNoing

[farla]

OpenOffice and Firefox do not recognize the word "sniggering".

I'm now curious if you could do some sort of long term rearrangement of vocabulary use simply by slowly removing terms from various spellchecks, encouraging people to retry with a supported synonym until the word falls out of use entirely, and if someone's already trying this out.

Comments

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's a variant, but in usage, there is a slight difference.

In terms of not being a jackass, it's giggle > snicker > snigger.

So if you snicker at something, you may be laughing at a joke at someone else's expense. If you snigger, you're laughing because the joke is at someone else's expense.

(Plus, you just can't use a long word like snickering twice in close proximity, so having a synonym is helpful.)

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

It must be a dialectical thing... I've never heard anyone say that out loud, and when I saw it in fic, I always assumed it was a function of people trying to sound out "snicker" and coming up with "snigger" due to some kind of accent.

Hm. I wonder if Lip has heard of it (he's from the same area as I am).

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's mostly a point of view sort of word. If you were recounting a story, and wanted to explain why you were justifying in, say, smacking someone, you'd say sniggered. As in, "I told them to knock it off, and they sniggered." There might be debate on if they actually were sniggering, but not that sniggering is obviously a slap-worthy action. Snickered is a bit judgmental, but allows for the possibility of non-malicious origin.

Which all may admittedly be a dialect thing from half the population mispronouncing a word and the other half picking it up and using both, but my point is, it's really useful if you want a firm condemnation of the other party with no pretense whatsoever of neutrality.