Hey Darkbloom - I thought you might enjoy this lexicography throwdown I stumbled across

Part 1. The main story. I begin with a posting I made to the American Dialect Society mailing list on November 2, somewhat revised here.

While I was putting Robert Hartwell Fiske's The Dictionary of Disagreeable English: A Curmudgeon's Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar (2005 -- yes, 2005, this book is really on the cutting edge of the time line) onto the shelf, it fell open to a page with an entry for TREPIDACIOUS, which caught my eye because i am an occasional (and proud) user of the word TREPIDATIOUS 'tremblingly reluctant' and took TREPIDACIOUS to be a misspelling of this word, which should have a T because TREPIDATION does. (A quick web Google search showed ca. 2,150 hits for TREPIDATIOUS, to 658 for TREPIDACIOUS, and Google asked about the latter if I meant the former. The site wordsmith.org notes the latter spelling and suggests that the word should be spelled with a T "if at all" -- on which, see below.) In any case, from here on I'm referring to the item in question as trepidatious; spelling isn't the issue.

Fiske's entry declares sternly that trepidatious is "solecistic for fearful (and similar words)"; he offers uneasy and anxious as well as fearful. A bit of thesaurisizing for the noun trepidation provided the following alternatives to trepidatious: agitated, alarmed, anxious, apprehensive, dismayed, fearful, frightened, hesitant, reluctant, timid, uneasy. But none of these expresses the shade of meaning I want when I use trepidatious; I want the sense of trembling reluctance that trepidation conveys. Trepidatious is simply a more vivid adjective than all the alternatives (though apprehensive comes closest to the effect I want), certainly a better choice than the three blander options that Fiske provides. On the general principle that you should use the best word for your purposes, I choose trepidatious.

Ah, but Fiske doesn't allow me this choice. He asserts, with utter self-assurance and no qualification:

Trepidacious is not a word.

raj gibson wrote:Has anyone read Pinker's book The Sense of Style? I received it as a gift and just started it recently.

vIv wrote:

raj gibson wrote:Has anyone read Pinker's book The Sense of Style? I received it as a gift and just started it recently.

The link Reuben posted directly above is a pretty unfavorable review of that very book.  I have not read it yet; the reviewer feels that Pinker's departures from prescriptivism are arbitrary and disingenuous in the sense of both possession and consumption of descriptivist/prescriptivist cake.

Duff... wrote:Number three I believe.