Learn English – verb of ‘remediation’ (no such thing as ‘remediated’)

The English word commentator comes directly from Medieval Latin commentator. However, this Latin ancestor is labelled as rare and some dictionaries don't have it.

Classical Latin does not use commentator but instead prefers commentor.

Both are formed after the verb commentārī, but one can see that by adding the standard Latin agent noun suffix ("-or") to the verb yields "commentor".

Please note that the Latin verb commentārī had a much broader meaning. It can be used as any of the followings: "to consider thoroughly [thoughts]", "to prepare [exposé]"; "to invent", "to compose", "to write [literary works]".

For instance, "commentarius" has the meaning of "memorandum , notebook". Remember for instance the original Latin title "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" of Julius Caesar's ("Commentaries on the Gallic War"): these are actually not comments but a notebook, a relation (a title designed to be neutral but with an agenda as is well known).

I'm not too sure why Medieval Latin "commentator" came to supplement Classical Latin "commentor" but I speculate that this is related to the gradual loss of meaning as "to invent" and to the consequent specialisation as "to expound" in which case "commentator" would be formed after "commentarius" the noun (this Julian "Commentarii" really looked like comments).

So we have "commentary" and "comment" (just as we have documentary and document).

Looking up both words in the Century Dictionary shows the nuance:

• A commentator "makes comments or critical or expository notes upon a book or other writing".
• A commenter "makes remarks about actions, opinions, etc.".

There's a whiff of scholarship in the commentator that is absent from the mere commenter.

I don't deny that musicality or morphological consistency have a role to play in our vocabulary. However, and this is particularly true of English, I would argue that when several words with close signification are in competition, they tend to specialise and contribute to the language's richness.

In that particular case the reason why we might be more attracted to the variant "commentator" is possibly because of its perceived higher quality standard.

Nevertheless, the word "commenter", having a long history of its own also has its dedicated niche where it is preferably used.

A significant proportion of the COCA corpus entries I found had "commenter" associated with "anonymous" or "typical": sounds better than "anonymous commentator" this time.

Interesting question! I don't think a single English word exists for this, at least not one that would be readily understood without explanation. If you want one, you'll have to make it up yourself, and be prepared to explain it. Antiversary, for instance, seems cute and compact, but is readily misinterpretable (a friend suggested to me the other day that an antiversary means one year after a couple breaks up).

But if you're willing to use more than one word, negative-first anniversary seems readily understandable; if I'm going to get married a year from now, it's my negative-first anniversary. Googling "negative one anniversary", "negative anniversary" and so on turns up plenty of hits, suggesting that this is a natural, intuitive way to describe the concept.

More colloquially, I often hear people using T-minus terminology - deriving from the countdowns we've all seen in movies, where rocket scientists say something like "T-minus 5 minutes" to mark the time until launch - when describing an anticipated event. So, for instance, a party that's held 1 year before your college graduation could be your "T-minus 1 year grad party."