deep-seated or deep-seeded

According to a Jan. 19 Fox News story from Houston about how "[a]n application form to join a parochial schools group that was sent to Texas Islamic schools has created misunderstanding and anger between local Muslims and Christians",

Iesa Galloway, Houston Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (search) said the questionnaire was "rooted in deep-seeded ignorance of the religion of Islam and the Muslim people."

For most Americans, "deep-seeded" is pronounced exactly the same way as "deep-seated", due to (what linguists call) flapping and voicing of /t/ in words like seated, as in many other contexts (e.g. in fatter and rabbiting and at all, but not in attack). And in terms of the current ordinary-language meaning of the words involved, "deep-seeded ignorance" makes sense, while "deep-seated ignorance" doesn't. Ignorance can be planted deep and thus have deep metaphorical roots, but deep-seated ignorance would have to be ignorance cut with a lot of room in the crotch, or maybe ignorance sitting in a badly-designed armchair.

Still, Fox News needs better copy editors.

The established phrase is "deep-seated", which is listed in any good dictionary and has 590,000 Google hits, while "deep-seeded" is not listed in any dictionary (at least as far as I've checked), and has only 24,800 Google hits, so that the public vote is 96% for seated, 4% for seeded.

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Ignorance can be planted deep and thus have deep metaphorical roots, but deep-seated ignorance would have to be ignorance cut with a lot of room in the crotch, or maybe ignorance sitting in a badly-designed armchair.

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Arkie said:

I think deep-set is a better choice.

Deep-seated indicates a feeling originating far beneath the surface. Birds seem to placid a creature to incur deep-seated animosity.

Deep-set means firmly fixed, as in a chance encounter with a fowl that turned horribly wrong, (that pigeon crapped on my hat) but an encounter that does not necessarily sour one on the entire world of birds.

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