On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: >David Silberstein says > > >>> > >I've sort of given up hope on "ambiguifies", which caused more of a >ruckus, and even inspired doggerel, but seems to have not had legs. > > <<<<< > > >Try "ambiguate". Linguists have been using "disambiguate" for a long >time. It earns my vote as one of the ugliest words I know, but it is >absolutely too useful (at least in my professional language) to do >without. > Yes, yes. Of course. But while "ambiguate" is the standard, I used "ambiguifies" because I was in the same word-manglingly-amused mood that I was when I later suggested "pararectal ideation". Hmm. Google suggests that while I am the only one to use the third person singular present indicative, I am not the first to use that particular verb. Interestingly, Norman Spinrad appears to have put "ambiguify" into /The Void Captain's Tale/. As a linguist, I am sure that you are deeply familiar with the phenomenon of mangling words in order to create jargon or nonce words, or purely for amusement value.