Author Topic: pardner??  (Read 1197 times)

mkenuk

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pardner??
« on: August 16, 2019, 03:10:51 AM »
re the partnered - or might it have been pardnered? - challenge game.

It has occasionally been suggested that Chi's lexicon shows a bias towards American words; here was another example.
Such a bias would be understandable, perhaps, given that the lexicon is based on an American word list (YAWL).

I did actually think of playing pardner but, not wanting to risk my 100% hit rate playing a word that I was sure would get a 'sorry, not known', rejected it. Foolish of me!

It does appear in the Oxford Dictionaries, defined as "a non-standard spelling of 'partner'".
I do have to ask whether such a non-standard spelling should really be classed as  common?

.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2019, 03:34:10 AM by mkenuk »

Morbius

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2019, 09:02:19 AM »
I agree.  I did play it, but was astonished that it came up as common.

Valerie

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2019, 09:25:05 AM »
Me too.  But I wasn't so much astonished as resigned.  When I first arrived in Australia from Britain in 1965 I thought the country was far more "americanized" than "anglicized".
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Jacki

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #3 on: August 16, 2019, 02:39:15 PM »
OMG - couldn't agree more - thought of pardner and dismissed it thinking don't be silly! I too didn't want to bugger up my strike rate.  And I was struggling to think if it had been played before - I've been playing almost three years now and couldn't recall that combination of letters.  Once again you live and learn with Chi!
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anona

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #4 on: August 16, 2019, 07:00:57 PM »
Common? I don't know whether I attempted this game, but pardner wouldn't occur to me - or if, in my desperation, it did, I'd dismiss it as not being a real word. Then I might remember the American thing and wonder if it was rare. On Ngram viewer, pardner flatlines on what looks like zero, and partner is on the increase.

Alan W

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2019, 02:11:22 PM »
I agree that pardner is not a common word, and it won't be treated as such in future, but I dispute that it's quite as ludicrous a notion as forumites are suggesting.

The online Oxford description of the word as a non-standard spelling is obviously not the whole story. I prefer the Shorter Oxford's treatment:

Quote
noun. colloq. (orig. US). l18.
[ORIGIN: Repr. a pronunc. of partner noun.]
A partner, a comrade. Freq. as a form of address.

The word is found in a great many dictionaries, including the online Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Thesaurus. Looking at the lists I considered in making the original assessment of common / rare, pardner is found, oddly, in the "2 of 4" list derived from 4 ESL dictionaries from British publishers. The word, even more oddly, is not in the "2 of 12" list based on US dictionaries. More recently, the creator of these lists, Alan Beale, has produced a list called 3of6game, derived from a mixture of US and British advanced learners dictionaries, which seems to me to be a fairly reasonable match to my idea of common words. This list includes pardner.

Use of the word outside the US is not unknown, usually in a context relating to the American West. For example the OED cites Margery Allingham's brilliant 1952 crime novel, Tiger in the Smoke: "'Now, pardner,' he said. They were both great readers of Westerns." A 2008 article in the Melbourne Age business section was headed "Howdy, pardner; nice to keep you company". The article compared taxation rules for partnerships and companies. In 2016 the Liverpool Echo reported that, "A star line-up of homeless hounds at Dogs Trust Merseyside are hoping it's time to say howdy pardner to their new owners." The dogs were all named after country singers.

Despite these occasional appearances, I accept that players - including perhaps some American players - may doubt that pardner is actually a word, thinking of it rather as no more than a representation of how some people pronounce partner. So it will be rare from now on.

Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites

mkenuk

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2019, 08:47:30 PM »
Thanks, Alan, meticulous as always.

Margery Allingham. There's a name I haven't come across for a while. Detective was named Albert Campion, as I remember.
Probably a much better mystery writer than Agatha Christie, but, for whatever reasons, never so well known.

TRex

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #7 on: August 20, 2019, 08:10:32 AM »
Despite these occasional appearances, I accept that players - including perhaps some American players - may doubt that pardner is actually a word, thinking of it rather as no more than a representation of how some people pronounce partner. So it will be rare from now on.

As Anne Curzan said in her TED talk (referenced in a different topic, if a word is used and understood by another, it is a word. So pardner is definitely a word. But I think of it in the same sense as dunno, kinda, sorta, etc.
« Last Edit: August 20, 2019, 11:51:41 AM by TRex »

mkenuk

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #8 on: August 20, 2019, 10:49:12 AM »
So partner is definitely a word.

Has your spell-checker / autocorrect been at this, TRex?
« Last Edit: August 20, 2019, 11:02:39 AM by mkenuk »

TRex

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Re: pardner??
« Reply #9 on: August 20, 2019, 11:52:02 AM »
Apparently. Corrected.