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Cohese

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Guy Barry

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Oct 9, 2012, 10:40:26 PM10/9/12
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This one definitely wasn't a mishearing. "What is it that makes this group
cohese, as a group?" (Presenter on "The Strand", BBC World Service arts
programme)

(And I'm not sure what "as a group" was meant to add either.)

--
Guy Barry

CDB

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Oct 10, 2012, 12:21:06 AM10/10/12
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As opponed to cohesing back to some other formation.


Harrison Hill

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Oct 10, 2012, 2:05:58 AM10/10/12
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With "cohere" and "cohesion" so close to each other in the dictionary
I wouldn't even think this is an error - merely a normal, everyday
usage the dictionaries have failed to pick up.

"What makes the group cohere" might mean "...to their tasks" so "...as
a group" confirms the meaning "...socially".

Guy Barry

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Oct 10, 2012, 2:31:59 AM10/10/12
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"Harrison Hill" wrote in message
news:4e3c1427-3747-4f47...@o30g2000vbu.googlegroups.com...

> On Oct 10, 3:40 am, "Guy Barry" <guy.ba...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > This one definitely wasn't a mishearing. "What is it that makes this
> > group
> > cohese, as a group?" (Presenter on "The Strand", BBC World Service arts
> > programme)
>
> > (And I'm not sure what "as a group" was meant to add either.)

> With "cohere" and "cohesion" so close to each other in the dictionary
> I wouldn't even think this is an error - merely a normal, everyday
> usage the dictionaries have failed to pick up.

No matches at the British National Corpus. A Google Search bring up:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3631728/I-cohere-you-cohere-lets-all-cohese.html
(presumably a joke, as it's only used in the title)
http://cohese.com/ (the name of a media production company, so presumably a
made-up word)
http://www.chacha.com/question/what-does-cohese-mean (answer: "it's not in
the dictionary. Did you mean 'coerce'?)
and then http://www.wordnik.com/words/cohese ("sorry, no definitions
found").

The last site, Wordnik, does list three examples. Curiously, I have only
ever come across this site once before: when looking for occurrences of
"foresquare", another spelling that you claimed was in normal usage but
doesn't appear to exist. I presume it must scour the Web for any
occurrences of a word, whether they're correct or not. A handful of
incorrect examples doesn't provide evidence of a word in actual usage.

I can see how it might have come about as a back-formation from "cohesion",
but only if the speaker was unaware of the verb "cohere" (which the writer
of the above-mentioned Telegraph article appeared to be, as she had to look
it up in the dictionary).

--
Guy Barry

navi

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Oct 10, 2012, 2:34:30 AM10/10/12
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People don't always speak coherently. Sometimes they just produce a sticky mess.
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