Another Shaumeyer-citing from this morning:
I keep seeing people saying odd things today. I just read this in a comment (not in this [Facebook] group) : “This would make a great non-demonational holiday greeting card.” Now, while the misspelling of “denominational” could be amusing enough, I’m really fascinated by the faux-portmaneau that came out, sounding something like it describes some people’s view that the US must be under Satan’s control.
There are a pretty large number of hits on non-demonational, suggesting that they aren’t all just inadvertent errors. Some likely originate in phonological reshapings, simplifications of the tricky /n … m … n/ sequence in denominational. (But some are likely to be orthographic simplifications. Note that a few of the cites have demonational in a header but denominational in the body of the text.)
A few examples:
Hate mongering non-demonational church in FL (link)
PRAISE TEMPLE OF GOD NON-DEMONATIONAL CHURCH, POCATELLO, ID (link)
Who knows of a non-demonational church, that believes in the gifts of tongues, and I think you cansee where I am going with this, in the Corpus Christie, Texas area.. (link)
Has anyone been here before? I’m looking for non-demonational church to have my cermony. Anyone know the price for Chapel Hill? (link)
And then there’s denomation (a different resolution of the complexity). Again, a fair number of hits:
Same denomation or changed? Did you change from the denomation you were raised in? (link)
Little Brooke Non-Denomation Church [Vernon TX] (link)
New Praise Non-Denomational Church [Fresno CA] (link)
Denominational is tricky both in pronunciation and spelling, so it’s ripe for simplification. Non-denominational is even worse.
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