@hm -- us:
I generally agree with your suggestions.
Regarding "point of time" -- could you give me an example in which you *would* use this expression? I'm reluctant to delete the entry entirely and would rather add some more information.

wouldn't it be point *in* time instead of *of*?

@opalo:
  related discussion:point of time / point in time

@hm -- us: forgot to mention: we are aware of the plural problem. There is indeed a possibility to throw them all out in one go. Kili is planning to implement another feature regarding the issue and we will batch-delete the plurals once that's working. :-) (in other words: don't waste your energy on pointing out plural entries)

I would never use 'point of time'.

The expression '[at that] point in time' is not infrequent, but it's a useless redundancy which can almost always be replaced by either 'point' or 'time' (as well as other choices).

I can actually recall when I first became aware of this term becoming widespread: it was during the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings, when many of the witnesses used this term during their testimony, broadcast live. This probably means the term had some currency already, but I wasn't aware of it before then.

Okay. <deep breath> I was hoping I had already made this as clear as I could in the other thread (in considerably less space), but let me try once again.

My whole point was that there are *not* any contexts that I know of in which 'point OF time' is really convincingly used *as a phrase,* rather than just as a group of three words not uncommon in themselves.

Like the other native speakers who have commented so far (hein mück and Peter <us>), I would not use 'point of time' myself at all. As Werner and opalo have said, 'point IN time' is the standard (albeit unattractive) phrase.

Uho's analogy to 'Punkt der Zeit' may help. Yes, you can find this combination of words on the internet. But does that mean it's an independent expression that should be listed as an entry in a printed dictionary? Learned and used by a non-native speaker? In fact, if a non-native found 'Punkt der Zeit' as an entry in LEO and innocently went off and wrote something like 'zu diesem Punkt der Zeit,' the German speakers would surely be the first to cry foul.

In general, it's discouraging to be asked to prove a negative. How many dictionaries do we have to consult without finding the phrase before we can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that it's not really a phrase? It's also discouraging when all the natives who comment are unanimous, yet some of the non-natives still don't seem to believe them. How many times, if at all, should natives have to explain or justify their own use of language? I've tried to be understanding because I'm all too well aware that it's much harder for non-natives to judge the validity of sources at sight. Yet I can't help remembering the 'laicistic' threads, which I found discouraging for the same two reasons.

It seems to me that the burden of proof rests with the non-native speakers (jannek, Uho) who believe 'point of time' is a standard phrase. If someone can find a dictionary listing for it, we native speakers might be more easily convinced. It's just that AFAIK no one has yet done so.

Here are examples of web hits for 'point of time' (not including the many by non-native speakers) that in my view still do NOT prove it's a standard phrase, as summarized in my post in the earlier thread.

Group A, as part of a formal definition or explanation, somewhat artificially substituted for a normal word such as 'instant,' 'moment,' or 'period':
• Concise OED: time - 2. a point of time as measured in hours and minutes past midnight or noon. ...
time immemorial - a point of time in the distant past beyond recall or knowledge.
• Webster's 1913: moment - 1. A minute portion of time; a point of time; an instant; as, at that very moment.
[Note that, contrary to the implication that might have been drawn from jannek's post of links without actual quotes in the earlier thread, these are NOT dictionary entries for the phrase 'point of time' itself.]

Group B, archaic:
• The whole life of man is but a point of time (Sir Walter Scott)
• ... in reality 'tis not the 1746th, but the 1750th year from the birth of Christ, at which remarkable point of time the christian æra is intended to commence... (Gentleman's Magazine, July 1745)

Group C, computer jargon (and/or poor writing):
• The following strings all indicate the same point of time
• TIME denotes a cetain [sic] point of time. It consists of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and a unit of time
• Multiple logins of the same user not allowed at any point of time

Group D, science fiction (and/or poor writing):
• My fictional time machine used for the purpose of illustration can hop into any miniscule [sic] point of time along the way
• If we are looking down upon time from a different dimension, we are able to see more than one point of time at once

Group E, coincidental collocations (the real lexical unit is another phrase such as 'end point'):
• The sophisticated astronomical culture of the Central American Maya considered this event to be the end and beginning point of time itself.

@Doris: Thanks for confirming what I hoped must surely be the case about the plurals. If someone had already told us that, sorry if I missed it. I trust the same is true for regular adverbs in -ly and for regularly inflected verb forms. Perhaps you guys will even figure out some clever way to handle transitive/intransitive and separable/inseparable. In any case, a global re-evaluation is super, and it's certainly worth taking the time to do it carefully. Please tell Kili thank you. (-:

@hm -- us (2-3): first of all -- apologies if I stepped on your toes by sounding like I didn't want to take your word for it. I didn't want to come across as a cantankerous person. I respect the authority of the English native speakers in this forum and I do appreciate you taking the time to write out a more detailed answer. I had found "point of time" in the OED and had a hunch that it might be used in a technical setting, which gave reason to my question. But okay, I'm happy to delete the entry.
Maybe you will be happy to hear that I also changed all your other suggestions (but again you can't see that yet).
@hm -- us (4): no, we hadn't told you yet. The plural issue is something we've only recently been discussing. Regular inflected forms are next on the list and I'm sure we won't stop there. I'll keep you posted :-)

@Doris: Thanks! I hope you don't now feel obliged to spend an *undue* amount of time keeping us posted, but the modest recent increase in information flow has been great. (-:

'Point of time' might indeed be usable in a more technical sense for all I know. I skimmed through my compact OED with the magnifying glass but only noticed a quote from 1737 under 'point' def. 24. a. (p. 1127) that didn't seem worth mentioning. But I don't have it on disk, so I couldn't do a computer search, so I may well have overlooked something. Any number of things in fact.

But even if it were, surely it could be translated by reference to 'point' and 'time' separately. That is, as a phrase, I don't think it meets Uho's added-value test (mentioned a while back in some other thread).

hm, wer könnte solch ausführlichen Darlegungen noch widersprechen ... ;o) Vielen Dank!

Es ist offensichtlich, dass "point of time" nicht idiomatisch ist. Mich hat das, zugegeben, überrascht, da
1. ich glaubte, diese Wendung zu kennen;
2. sie sogar in renommierten Wörterbüchern auftauchte, wenngleich nicht als eigener Eintrag, sondern nur in Erläuterungen ("point in time" war aber auch nur schwer zu finden).
3. über Google zahlreiche von Native Speakern zu kommen scheinende sinnvolle Verwendungen zu finden waren (insgesamt 140k Treffer). Die Analogie zum "zufälligen" Auftreten des Begriffs (also außerhalb fester Wendungen) wie in "Punkt der Zeit" hatte mich auch beschäftigt, doch auch hier fand ich folgendes:
'point' 117m ggü. 'Punkt' 6m = Verhältnis 20:1
'time' 417m ggü. 'Zeit' 29m = Verhältnis 14:1
'point of time' 141k ggü. 'Punkt der Zeit' 144 = 1000:1 (!)
Damit scheint offensichtlich, dass der Anteil von "point of time" am gesamten Sprachschatz des Webs erheblich größer ist als der von "Punkt der Zeit".

Aber natürlich glaube ich dir und Peter eher als Google.

Was ich aber noch nicht ganz verstanden habe: Würdest du (und Peter) aber auch so weit gehen wollen, es als "falsch" zu bezeichnen? "I wouldn't use it" -- in Ordnung, ich würde auch viele "richtige" Begriffe im Deutschen nicht verwenden, die aber dennoch nicht falsch sind.

Wie dem auch sei, eine sehr interessante Diskussion, aus der ich einiges gelernt habe -- mehr als nur, dass "point of time" offensichtlich nicht idiomatisch ist:
1. Vermutlich habe ich "point of time" nicht von Native Speakern gehört, sondern von Deutschen oder anderen Non-Native-Speakern, es mir aber dennoch zu eigen gemacht.
2. Die Verwendung in bekannten Wörterbüchern ist auch keine Garantie dafür, dass es eine übliche Verwendung ist.
3. Wieder einmal haben Suchmaschinen eher verwirrt als geholfen. (Wobei ich weiterhin glaube, dass sie allgemein eher helfen als verwirren.)

@hm: ups, ich habe deinen letzten Beitrag erst jetzt gesehen. Das beantwortet meine Frage eigentlich schon.

Frage am Rande: Warum das [sic] hinter "miniscule"? m-w.com sagt:
Main Entry: min·is·cule
Pronunciation: 'mi-n&s-"kyü(&)l
variant of MINUSCULE
(und LEO führt es auch ...)

Doris, eine tolle Sache mit den pluralen, aber: wollt ihr denn wirklich alle Plural-Einträge automatisch löschen? Ich denke, man müsste schon etwas "eye-balling" darauf verwenden, schließlich gibt es unter ihnen auch sinnvolle wie zum Beispiel "costs -- die Kosten".

@Uho: not to worry. Wir werden schon aufpassen, daß wichtige Pluraleinträge drin bleiben :-)

Sorry, sorry, I know that nobody, including me, wanted to see this dead thread rise again. But I also don't want to give the impression of blowing Uho off, so...

@Uho: I gladly concede the point that 'point of time' is considerably more common than 'Punkt der Zeit.' No analogy is perfect. I had the same thought about ratios, but math isn't really my thing, so thanks for doing the actual calculations on web hits.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that 'point of time' is always wrong; obviously there are contexts where you can use those three words and be understood. (The science-fiction ones actually made the most sense to me.) But I stick by the theory that it's not a normal phrase, unless someone can convince me otherwise.

As for 'miniscule' [sic, sic, sick!] in Webster's, and even American Heritage (now *that* really shocked me, because they didn't use to be so lax), all I can say is that IMNSHO they're just flat out wrong. Garner at least still sides with me:

"minuscule. So spelled, not _miniscule._ But the word is commonly misspelled... The word derives from the word _minus;_ it has nothing to do with the prefix _mini-._ The counterpart -- a rarity -- is _majuscule._"
(Dictionary of Modern American Usage, 1998)

But it's probably a losing battle. Next thing we know, M-W and AHD will probably be adding 'seperate' and 'definately,' and Duden will be adding 'Vorraus' -- all based on, you guessed it, Gurgle hits. *g*

Great to see you quoting from Bryan Garner's book--I heartily recommend it.

A footnote: while rare in English, 'majuscule' means 'upper-case' in French. 'Miniscule' in Fr. retains the same meaning as in En., as well as having the meaning 'lower-case'.

@Peter: Well, I've been trying to beef up my library, and I admit I bought this one partly on your recommendation, so you can pat yourself on the back. (-: The guy isn't perfect -- so far I disagree with him on, for example, 'waft'; and I wouldn't actually have called 'majuscule' meaning uppercase rare in English, just relatively uncommon. But he brings a lot of thought and effort to the task, and I appreciate that.

Um, mein antique Petit Larousse dit eigentlich 'minUscule' mit u aussi...

hm, thanks! No worries, I did not feel blown off -- but have no concerns about this thread rising again either, as I find it most interesting.

I now see your point re 'miniscule' -- not a word I come across every day, hence I had to look it up. And, like you, it would worry me seeing "seperate" in a dictionary one day. I recentrly found the word "Reperatur" even in the heading of a Siemens telephone manual.

*pat* *pat* *pat*

Hey, hm:

Have to say I agree with Garner about 'waft' (I say it to rhyme with 'raft'). There's been times when I had some minor disagreement, but he's got so much common sense, doesn't have a stick up his bleep and explains well, so I really like him.

Speaking of which: I think someone broached the subject of 'there's + pl. verb' which I find acceptable in speech where I would reject 'there is + pl. verb'. Have no idea why, it just sounds okay that way. Wonder if Pinker addressed it. Garner rejects it, which is fair enough, for writing.