Thursday, March 29, 2007

"Teachery"

Just heard a presentation where people were warned about being "too teachery" in instructional web stuff. Seemed like a word that would lean heavily to the negative (like in this example). Poking around by google, it does look like it appears really often with "too", but I'm surprised by things like Amazon's "teachery stuff".

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a teacher, so am I being too teachery if I refer to my husband's doctory handwriting? Or my daughter's lawyery writing?

Unfortunately, most teachery stuff is connotatively negative. Maybe teachery conjures visions of treachery.

Mr. Verb said...

Yeah, my reaction was exactly the same as yours, yet it seems to be used positively sometimes.

But does doctory handwriting count as actual handwriting?

Anonymous said...

For those of you who get a negative on teachery, do you also get a negative on doctory (like they ought to clean up their handwriting), and lawyery (too pompous and unreadable)? If so (and I'm one of you), then is this a morphological confusion of the diminutive -y, collapsing with the adjectival -y (runny eggs, e.g.)?

Anonymous said...

As someone with handwriting that even doctors can look down on, I do get that reading.

The confusion of those two -y suffixes seems like a promising account of this to me, as a non-morphologist.

Anonymous said...

And then there's morphologisty...

Mr. Verb said...

Well, yeah, true enough ... we prefer verby around there.

Anonymous said...

What is the profession of a teacher called? Is not it relevent to call it 'teachery'?