Edwin Miles (asker) Apr 27, 2010:

@ Andrew That's one of the best puns for a while... although will it ever beat the sign on my old professor's door: "Incorrigible punster. Please do not incorrige."?

Edwin Miles (asker) Apr 27, 2010:

@ Johanna Thank you, yes, that makes things much clearer, something like the difference in English between "written" and "writerly." This is valuable knowledge, moreso than the small can of worms I seem to have opened concerning the "value-of-google-hits."

To all contributors, thanks for your assistance with this.

Lancashireman Apr 27, 2010:

Document a Tory Keep tabs on your local Conservative candidate and any public utterances he/she may make so you can quote these back to him/her at a political hustings.
www.documentatory.org

Donald Scott Alexander Apr 26, 2010:

Well, many dictionaries are based on corpora... ...and Google could certainly be seen as a very large corpus / set of corpora.

As Lingua.Franca says, blindly citing Google hits might not constitute good lexicography

But this does not mean that it is *impossible* to use Google as a set of corpora, as long as you apply some lexicographic (and semantic) analysis to actually evaluate and interpret the hits which it returns.

Not to start a flame war or anything... but language is dynamic and evolving, and usage examples on Google (evaluated and interpreted by a translator with some grasp of lexicography and semantics) do mean something, particularly if one tends towards a less "prescriptivist" and more "usagist" view of language.

Valeria E. (X) Apr 26, 2010:

I also do not use Google for the determination of a word or for the determination of its importance, because Google is not made for this use.-

Lingua.Franca Apr 26, 2010:

Is Google now a good reference? I think that using Google to determine whether a word is valid or not (or even exists or not) is a terrible mistake. I see it all the time: translators justify their lexical choices based on the number of Google hits. I see grave mistakes being justified by sentences such as "well, there are 4,246 hits on Google, so I used it."

There are probably dozens of millions of websites, maybe even more than 100,000,000. Even if 1 in 10,000 makes up a word, misuses a word, misspells a word, Google will return hundreds, if not thousands of hits.

The word "unbelieve", for example, returns 244,000 hits. 4,810 hits for "disimprove".

Everybody can write nowadays and post it on the Internet with impunity. I often have to contact my clients to tell them that they use words that do not exist. It happens so often, it is scary. Just because a word is on the Internet does not render it correct.

I am not saying that "dokumentatorisch" is not a word, check the dictionary, but just because someone wrote it and there are 10,000 hits on Google does not mean that exists. It surely does not tell you what the author meant.

Johanna Timm, PhD Apr 26, 2010:

subtle difference Dokumentarisch - in dokumentierender Art
Dokumentatorisch - in der Art eines Dokumentators
just like:
Agitatorisch- in der Art eines Agitators
Agitierend – in aufhetzender, anstachelnder Weise usw.

Deklamierend - in rezitierender Weise
Deklamatorisch- in der Art eines Deklamators

Donald Scott Alexander Apr 26, 2010:

Fascinating Googling both "documentatory" and "documentary" brings up no hits where the two 'terms' are differentiated... but does bring up plenty of hits where the person spelled it first one way, and then the other.

I think you've witnessed the birth of a sort of malapropism along the lines of "suburbian"!

Lancashireman Apr 26, 2010:

Nothing definitive, Edwin ... ... but it sounds to me like the German equivalent of 'documentatory' which also registers on Google. One swallow may not make a spring, but 679 hits point to widespread illiteracy.