Miscellaneous Entries.
recreational; recreative. “Recreational” is the standard adjective corresponding to the noun “recreation”; it’s about 1,000 times as common as its synonym “recreative,” a needless variant. But “recreative” is genuinely useful in the sense “tending to re-create” — e.g.: “The paradoxically destructive and recreative force of the mythical flood seemed as real to Friday’s performers as it must have to the composer.” Timothy Pfaff, “Innocence of Children Survives ‘Noah’s Flood,'” S.F. Examiner, 24 June 1995, at C1.
recriminatory; *recriminative. The latter is a needless variant.
recruitment; *recruital. The latter is a needless variant.
recur; reoccur. The first means “to happen repeatedly, often at regular intervals.” The second means merely “to happen again.”
recurrence; *recurrency; reoccurrence. “Recurrence” refers to a repeated occurrence, especially at regular intervals. *”Recurrency” is a needless variant. “Reoccurrence” refers to another occurrence of something, with no suggestion that the thing happens repeatedly or at regular intervals.
redeemable; *redemptible. The first is standard. Avoid the second, which is pedantic, unnecessary, and irredeemable.
*Invariably inferior forms.
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Quotation of the Day: “Poetry recovers to language its imaginal or substantival dimension, almost as fast as language loses it, though of course not quite. That is probably what poetry is for, as nearly as we can state it. It is a special and artificial kind of discourse fighting for excuse to live in a society which has proscribed it.” John Crowe Ransom, “Poetry as Primitive Language” (1942), in The Writer and His Craft 146, 150 (Roy W. Cowden ed., 1956).
