From the phone on my desk I got Jane Geer at her office.
“Archie,†I told her.
She snapped, “Archie who?â€
“Oh, come, come. We haven't sicked the police onto you, have we? Let's gossip a while.â€
Rex Stout (Trouble in Triplicate).
Nero Wolfe isn't just a gourmet and gourmand, but he has a Big Dic on a stand in his officw, so I was a little surprised to find Archie Goodwin writing "sicked" instead of "sicced". Of course, the Montenegan disagrees with lexicographers at times, but there is no discussion, so I think maybe this was an error (perhaps introduced by an idiot copy editor at Viking Press.)
The verb "to sic" comes from the Latin "sic" rather than the path used for the illness "sick", doesn't it?
I took Latin in Ohio (where Archie hails from( back before all the Lats died off, so my "old-timers' disease" means Viking Press doesn't have ALL the idiots....
My preference is also for sicced (which I now see spell-check disapproves of), but there's a precedent for the letter K to mysteriously appear when the word ending in C picks up a suffix starting with a vowel. You'll often read of an old country doctor physicking his patients, or a sorcerer who magicked the prince.
Well, my wife seems to have packed away my one-seventh of a ton of Nero Wolfe books, but "sicked" feels un-Goodwinesque and un-Stoutish to me. M-W says that "sic" is an alteration of "seek," and "sicced" and "sicked" are both in use.
The image of Wolfe feeding dictionary pages into the fireplace is to me the most vivid in the whole series.
I agree that adding an orthographic k is a standard for some forms of verbs ending in c. It is used in the forms when the ending would otherwise turn a hard c into a soft c.
Cf. you politic; he politics; they politicked; we are politicking. Specifically the front vowels have this effect and not the back vowels. Cf. political, politico.
The result of the orthographic k seems a bit old-style to me, since some obsolete orthography avoided a final c as well and added an orthographic k. I am not surprised that orthographic doubling of the c before some ending might be gaining some traction in recent years.
Ron Draney said
My preference is also for sicced (which I now see spell-check disapproves of), but there's a precedent for the letter K to mysteriously appear when the word ending in C picks up a suffix starting with a vowel. You'll often read of an old country doctor physicking his patients, or a sorcerer who magicked the prince.
I have also seen (and quoted) mimicked.
Emmett