Is there such a word...?

[caddyman]

A US policeman has just used the phrase '..there was no evidentiary link..'on the History channel.

All my dictionaries are in the office, so I can't confirm my suspicion that this is drivel.

Comments

[littleonions.livejournal.com]

Of evidence; evidential.
For the presentation or determination of evidence: an evidentiary hearing.
:)

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Hmm... it still sounds wrong to me. But there you go. ;-)

[irdm.livejournal.com]

I think it was perfectly reasonably of you to assume an American used a made-up word. Think how many they make up anyway, such as "thru" and "theater" and BLOODY "CENTER"!!!!!
Which I have to abuse my keyboard with on a regular (HTML) basis.

Unless the word is used in relation to someone who divides things into 100s or 1/100ths ?

[littleonions.livejournal.com]

Now,unusually for me I actually admire most of the spelling alterations the Americans have made to English, or the common tongue as it will one day be known. Our language is unwieldy and in a lot of cases bloody archaic, useing rules that applied to Anglo-Saxon and have absolutely no relevance today,I mean none. This fact, as well as dabbling badly with linguistics (I had a sadistic linguistic tutor)has been brought into stark focus when my wee one wanted to know why Jiraffe began with a G... and other such "Well it just does" lessons in English.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Spelling alterrations don't bother me too much either, with the exception of 'thru' which, to be fair, never caught on in US standard English. Most of the alternate spellings are Elizabethan English anyway.

It's the coining of new words simply because the person trying to speak doesn't realise that an appropriate word already exists. My Times dictionary ignores the very existence of 'evidentiary' and the OED merely defines it as 'evidential'. This leads me to the conclusion that it is a made up word which has gained currency.

My current bugbear is 'Quadrilogy' which, I suspect will replace the more correct but little known 'tetralogy'...

[pauln.livejournal.com]

Bloody Romans displacing Greek culture again...

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Breeding with it more like, since quad is from the Latin and ology is from the Greek.

Tetralogy is a pure-bred word from the Greek.

I have nothing against English 'borrowing' words from other languages - that's what made the language great - but again, it's the coining of new ones where there is already a proper word there. See 'shortfall' v. 'deficit' and 'ongoing' v. 'continuing' for further examples.

[irdm.livejournal.com]

Certainly the two words you examplate ( (c) DM 2004 ) seem to be part of the blame culture, as regards words with less admitance of guilt?

[agentinfinity.livejournal.com]

I think people like sticking extra bits on words. He could have just said there was no evidence. I recall someone told me it had something to do with lots of Americans descending from Germans, and wanting to make compound words out of everything. Of course, that could be a load of cod.