Friday, September 10, 2010
syncing vs. synching
The commenters over at Liberman's post Apico-labials in English all clearly prefer the spelling syncing, but I find it just weird looking and find synching more betterer.
Google does little to resolve the issue:
Over at COHA, the issue is more clear:
What the graph says is that while historically syncing has been the preferred spelling, synching has taken a sudden and dramastical lead. In other words, I'm winning. Damn right.
COHA charts (same data as above)
Google does little to resolve the issue:
- syncing = 3,840,000 hits
- synching = 3,830,000 hits
Over at COHA, the issue is more clear:
What the graph says is that while historically syncing has been the preferred spelling, synching has taken a sudden and dramastical lead. In other words, I'm winning. Damn right.
COHA charts (same data as above)
syncing
synching
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The commenters over at Liberman's post Apico-labials in English all clearly prefer the spelling syncing , but I find it just weird look...
12 comments:
"synching" looks odd to me, as if it should be pronounced like "cinching".
I think "syncing" looks weird as if it should be pronounced "sinsing." Perhaps we should spell it "syncking" like "picnicking."
I like the "syncking" idea, haha. We've got picnicking, panicking, frolicking, trafficking. The point of this is to keep the words from sounding like "pic-nice-ing," so it's pretty much the same idea.
I object to syncing because the "ch" is one letter in the original Greek word "khronos" (χρόνος), and it seems stupid to split it down the middle. Spelling it as "syncing" makes it look like it should be said like "mincing".
synchring :)
Orrrrr you could say synchronising
???
The while thing just gives me a syncing feeling.
Or is it a synching feeling.
I dunno…
C'mon... Sync is the schortened form of synchronize. Sync is shorter than synch. I would like to lynch synch.
The reason that the number of people preferring the "synching" spelling is because each decade the general population has continued to increase in illiteracy and incompetence. In other words, our academic hopes are "Sinking."
Surely it has to be "synching" because the root word is synchronise. With the "ch" being a phoneme (I think!).
If you have a continual back pain, you would say "My back is aching" NOT "My back is acing"!
The same should therefore apply to synching?
@Stephen Beale
That is wrong logic. Aching is the verb form of the noun 'ache'. The verb form of the noun 'synchronise' is 'synchronising'.
Seeing as we are shortening 'synchronise', why stop at 'synch' instead of 'sync'?
I landed on this page because I wondered if anyone had solved the issue of how to spell the progressive participle of synchronise (which is with an s because I'm writing in the UK). I like the solution with the k, like picnicking. But I'm going with sync'ing because we can use the apostrophe to stand for the omitted characters in the full version, synchronising. Similar to how I prefer to deal with the verb 'demonstrate' (demo'd, demo'ing). What do you think?
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