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<blockquote data-quote="Marius Delphus" data-source="post: 4194119" data-attributes="member: 447">Language evolves. That's true. I'm cool with that. I'm hip. I grok that. That's swell; that's way cool; that's hunky-dory with me.We're talking about what appears to be, at best, a variant spelling of a very rare word here. The variance amounts to a single letter that usually appears and sometimes doesn't in occurrences of the word over the past few centuries. The less common spelling doesn't actually duplicate that of another existing word (unlike &quot;rogue&quot; vs. &quot;rouge&quot;). It's not possible to definitively pin down one spelling as &quot;correct&quot; and the other as &quot;incorrect&quot; (unlike, again, &quot;rogue&quot; vs. &quot;rouge&quot;), but the preponderance of the evidence adduced so far points toward leaving in the &quot;i&quot; as being the standard spelling.However valid (or not) as an alternate spelling, &quot;Justicar&quot; is not, by these lights, a neologism, nor is it evidence of an imminent language shift. And it shouldn't be enough to raise a &quot;prescriptive&quot; vs. &quot;descriptive&quot; debate on modern English spelling, grammar, and usage (but there's that word, &quot;should,&quot; again). And, anyway, if you try &quot;language evolves&quot; as an excuse for not following standard English when writing a term paper, business proposal, or published work, your grades will suffer, your company won't get the contract, and you'll be raked over the coals for your inability to use standard English -- you will not be lauded for your forward thinking or your free-form approach to language evolution.The revolution won't start because people misspell a word from the Player's Handbook. Appealing to White Wolf and World of Warcraft won't help, either.WOTC appears to have decided (IMO, rightly) to standardize on &quot;Justiciar&quot; for Fourth Edition. One hopes that they will stick to their guns and that third-party publishers will follow suit (if only because seeing it spelled it two different ways in forthcoming material would give me a splitting headache).Personally, I don't even know why people are getting so het up about this. It's an archaic word for which WOTC has chosen a spelling that actually agrees with how it's most often been spelled, historically. How does this even become an issue?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Marius Delphus, post: 4194119, member: 447"] Language evolves. That's true. I'm cool with that. I'm hip. I grok that. That's swell; that's way cool; that's hunky-dory with me. We're talking about what appears to be, at best, a variant spelling of a very rare word here. The variance amounts to a single letter that usually appears and sometimes doesn't in occurrences of the word over the past few centuries. The less common spelling doesn't actually duplicate that of another existing word (unlike "rogue" vs. "rouge"). It's not possible to definitively pin down one spelling as "correct" and the other as "incorrect" (unlike, again, "rogue" vs. "rouge"), but the preponderance of the evidence adduced so far points toward leaving in the "i" as being the standard spelling. However valid (or not) as an alternate spelling, "Justicar" is not, by these lights, a neologism, nor is it evidence of an imminent language shift. And it shouldn't be enough to raise a "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive" debate on modern English spelling, grammar, and usage (but there's that word, "should," again). And, anyway, if you try "language evolves" as an excuse for not following standard English when writing a term paper, business proposal, or published work, your grades will suffer, your company won't get the contract, and you'll be raked over the coals for your inability to use standard English -- you will not be lauded for your forward thinking or your free-form approach to language evolution. The revolution won't start because people misspell a word from the Player's Handbook. Appealing to White Wolf and World of Warcraft won't help, either. WOTC appears to have decided (IMO, rightly) to standardize on "Justiciar" for Fourth Edition. One hopes that they will stick to their guns and that third-party publishers will follow suit (if only because seeing it spelled it two different ways in forthcoming material would give me a splitting headache). Personally, I don't even know why people are getting so het up about this. It's an archaic word for which WOTC has chosen a spelling that actually agrees with how it's most often been spelled, historically. How does this even become an issue? [/QUOTE]

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