I'm on a GoogleFight kick, since watching terms slug it out in Flash feels like you're doing research, sort of, but hey, fun. But the question actually came first, which was this: when did invite (1,580,000) start becoming a serious contender for invitation (15,400,000)? Such as I'll send you an invite, a sentence I might hear several times a day.[1]
It's clearly not a new phenomenon, since most dictionaries list it as a noun, "informal." I suppose my real question is whether people who use an invite regularly also use an invitation in more formal contexts or whether it's more dialectical -- you use one or the other more-or-less exclusively. (I'll send you a wedding invite.)
[1] Mind you, no one's inviting me, and certainly not if I persist in asking "Did you just say an invite?"
FWIW, an INVITE is a type of message in SIP, the leading signaling language for Voice over IP (voip).
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry that people are substituting invite for invitation in casual speak. I'd weigh how much chatter there is on the Internet about a VoIP protocol (that has been developed, debated, and discussed i Internet communities) against how much non-computer sciency chatter about invitations is on the Internet.
To be clear, I don't worry about it, I'm just interested in when the phenomenon started occuring. For all I know, it's been there all along (the "recency illusion" -- http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html)
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