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I suspect that the original poster was not in fact asking people to drive out
the unwanted parts of the message by prayer ("exorcise"). Using an editor to
cut out the offending bits ("excise") would, on the whole, probably be more
efficient.
I was assuming that the original poster and the subsequent ones
using "exorcise" instead of "excise" were having a joke. Now I'm not sure.
This is not a case of English having different words for the same thing.
Discussions about exorcism should be kept to talk.religeon.misc in future!
> If you have examples, please (text editor permitting) exercise only as much
> of the message as you need to establish context and exorcise the rest. :->
> [...]
> I think the mistakes, like "exercise" for "exorcise" are mostly the result
> of the poor editing capabilities on E-mail, as well as poor-to-no spell
> [...]
> The "exercise" example was one of them. I knew quite quickly it was meant
> to be "exorcise" as I would have had the person mispronounced "exorcise"
> had we been conversing. Again, I am not arguing against excellence, just
> [...]
> I meant had typed the word 'exrocise' and my speller
> actually offers 'exercise' and 'exorcise' as corrections. I picked
> one w/out thinking of the context. (sigh)
