Philip is right… when it comes to developing terminology, I’ve scored some real zeroes. Underoptimization may sound icky, but I’d meant it to evoke underspecification in an OT frame, while maintaining a distinction from Lexicon Optimization. Meanwhile his post persuasively suggests that the distinction may be an unnecessary one.

Another icky word that still makes me chuckle is stipulativity, which I included in a title of a paper I presented at the LSA in Boston. I think the paper upset some audience members, leading to a lively question period, but the difficulty we all had in pronouncing the word (I thought) really lightened the mood. Turns out a scant few others have used the word before me, but evidently only in a linguistic and/or computational context.

Anyway reduplicandum is a third potential stinker I’ve been wanting to use, and to be honest I still haven’t found it a home. Regardless, a paper by Kleanthes Grohmann and Andrew Nevins beat both me and Philip to it.