Reoccurence or Recurrence?

From a message today about system problems at work overnight...

"...there will continue to be a risk of performance degradation and reoccurrence."

I know both are in the dictionary and the defenitions are pretty much identical but I shudder whenever I see or hear reoccurrence. It just seems inelegant and jarring on the ear. The definition for recurrence seems to suggest the possibility of the event happening many times which reoccurence doesn't quite have.

I suppose my pedantry in this instance is wrong. Can anyone help me justify my preference so that I can feel superior again to my crass colleagues who use this word?

What I was always taught (went to school in the 60's) was thus:

reoccur-it might happen again, sporadically or irregularly
recur-it will happen again, usually in a pattern or methodically, usually repeatedly

Examples:
Hurricanes reoccur
Sunrise/sunsets recur

Of course, grammar is relative and it might have changed by now!

If you must use "reoccur", then tess_i_am's rule is probably a good one. But it's one of those words that you are only likely to need when you're trying to prevent people from understanding what you write. The example above could equally well have read "...it's likely to happen again and mess the system up".

I'm confident tess_i_am is correct and perhaps explains why we speak of recursive algorithms rather than reoccuring ones.

It seems I may have to just satisfy myself with correcting genuinely incorrect usage then. Bah!

Of course a recursive algorithm doesn't just do something over and over, that would be an iterative algorithm. I guess the comp sci term recursive differs from its common language root.

>4 Jonny-Hoochie-Pants:
Recursion/recursive in English used to be yet more synonyms for "re(o)current". They got their special sense in maths sometime around the end of the 19th century.
The OED seems to be a bit confused about precisely how: "recursive" is said to have come from the German use of "rekurrent" (1904) and "rekursiv" (1931), but the earliest use of "recursion" in maths in English seems to pre-date both of these. Odd.

Wow, that's quite interesting Thorold. I think recursion in maths and in programing do mean different (but similiar) things.

jjwilson in a sense recursive algos are also iterative in that they need to call themselves again and again in order for the function to eventually supply the result. I hate coding recursive stuff though; hurts my brain.

Just now in a written conversation I have used the phrase “disappearances and reoccurrences,” suggesting things going missing and things coming back that have been before. If it were “disappearances and recurrences” or “disappearance and recurrence” the multipleness might not be as apparent, nor the process or eventness of appearing, disappearing, occurring, reoccurring. Perhaps the present particular use of a word in a phrase or context can be allowed; poetic license?