Well, all the maths have messed up your head

I have virtually no math crowding up my brainpan and, yet, I have to agree with Hil.

Well, personally and naturally both have the "a" as a syllable. Hypothetically and rhetorically should, though it's sometimes elided. But hy-po-the-ti-cal-ly sounds OK, while pub-li-cal-ly sounds weird.

Well, all the maths have messed up your head.

Hee! I laughed and the dog freaked out. I think I'm not supposed to laugh when no one else is home.

Though it's been said that I "over-edit."

Pffft. I went and looked at an excerpt at Ellora's cave and was horrified. They need someone to "over-edit." Of course, we will not give them our secret over-editrix weapon.

Yeahl lisah, but we were just discussing your errors in judgment in LJ. Besides, everyone knows musicians are on the drugs.

Oh, and both Random House and American Heritage agree with me.

But does Oxford American?

Can we just take this to a jello pit?

Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

Publicly is the usual spelling; publically does occur, but rarely in Edited English.

Timelies!!

Much ~ma for Matt & Nora & whomever else.

do you like publically or publicly?

"Publicly", though my inner 12 year old giggles every time I see it.

Oh, publicly is valid spelling. It's just not right.

Besides, some random guy on the internet agrees with me:

‘Publicly’ is surpassed only by ‘subtlety’ as English's most abominable word. But whilst we're lumbered with the latter, for the former we have a fine and upstanding alternative in ‘publically’. Or we would do if the word wasn't so unfittingly maligned—a fate we can, thankfully, spare it with just a brief look at the history of the word and the logic behind its use.

In 1567 the adverb ‘publikely’ first made its appearance. It stayed that way for about a century until ‘publiquely’ and ‘publickly’ arose in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The form ‘publicly’ didn't make its appearance until 1855, nearly three hundred years after the first form. Sixty-five years later, we shifted once again to ‘publically’. It was Edith Sitwell who gifted it to us.

But in so-called edited English, ‘publicly’ remains standard. Why? Because of the usual pernicious mixture of prescriptivism and ignorance. Spelling became fixed in English when ‘publicly’ was at the zenith in its vogue, and the simple combination of adjective + "-ly" suffix seems eminently logical. But neither spellings nor meanings are ever entirely fixed in language, and moreover ‘publicly’ isn't as logically consistent as it may first appear.

The OED, after stating that "-al" is often used to form secondary adjectives, notes a cornucopia of adverbs that no longer have their "-al" counterparts. The adverb, it says, "is almost always in -ically even when only the adj. in -ic is in current use, as in athletically, hypnotically, phlegmatically, rustically, scenically." And you can add to that asyndeton my own canonical retort of ‘basically’, as in "publicly is basicly an abomination". Please, let publically be.

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