Um, “conscience” is a word, but “sub-conscience” is not. I don’t know where you got the idea that I said that “conscience” is not a word; I thought I made it crystal clear that it is. I did say that the fact that “conscience”, “conscious”, and “subconscious” are words does not mean that “sub-conscience” is a word. Two words can share a root but not be able to be modified by the same prefixes or suffixes.

Most importantly, even if it is a word, it doesn’t mean what you originally said it meant (the noun form of “subconscious”), since subconscious can be used as a noun without modification and there is no similar connection between “conscious” and “conscience”. (Also, it would not be hyphenated.)

At any rate, I’ve gone through dozens of dictionaries—printed and online—trying to find “subconscience” or “sub-conscience”, only to fail. Since I can’t think of a plausible definition for “sub-conscience” that makes sense, I’d’ve been more surprised if I had. I have found “conscious”, “conscience”, and “subconscious”, and I found evidence that “subconscious” can be used as a noun. I even looked outside of dictionaries, but I still can’t find evidence that it was used outside of obvious spelling errors. And I don’t have the burden of proof. You’re making the positive claim, so you need to provide verifiable evidence that you’re right if you want to persuade anyone.

You’re complaining a lot about political correctness supposedly erasing words, but you offer no explanation as to what could possibly be politically incorrect about “sub-conscience”, which makes that topic completely irrelevant here. And neither political correctness nor anything else being discussed here have anything to do with corporatizing America, police militarization, the country’s (supposed) falling credit rating (whatever that means), or the country’s obscene debt. In fact, I’m pretty sure the people most obsessed with imposing PC culture are also opposed to police militarization and corporate America. But that doesn’t even matter because they’re unrelated to each other.

Yes, the English language changes over time, as do most languages. Some words are added, some gain new meanings, some have their meanings change, some lose old meanings, and some fall out of use altogether. There is nothing wrong with this, but more importantly, you haven’t given us sufficient evidence that “sub-conscience” is or has ever been a word that has ever been used. I mentioned that I cannot conceive of a concept for which “sub-conscience” would be defined, so I am skeptical that the term ever existed.

You have cited a 60+-year-old Oxford dictionary that you haven’t used in a long time and would take years for you to find for the proposition that the word exists. There are many reasons this is less than convincing.

First, there are many dictionaries available, online and offline, that you could use, yet you refuse. Online ones are readily available—not all of which operate like Wikipedia, which is still more reliable than you give it credit for—and if those aren’t enough, I’m sure there’s a library with a dictionary you could use. Printed dictionaries rarely remove words entirely; they’ll generally add qualifiers like “archaic” or “dated” to show that a word or meaning isn’t part of the modern vernacular, things like “slang” for improper/informal terms and (occasionally) spellings, or things like “vulgar” if it’s offensive or, sometimes, politically incorrect. Plus, dictionaries are generally descriptivist, so political correctness is rarely a significant factor in deciding which words to include or whether to add qualifiers. Words are generally only removed if the reason for their inclusion was erroneous (c.f. “dord”). I can find quite a few terms that are no longer part of the modern vernacular or that are not part of formal English in all sorts of online and printed dictionaries.

Second, a 60+-year-old dictionary is definitely out-of-date, and unless you still use “duck” to mean a “sweet woman”, that doesn’t explain why you’d use such an old dictionary to determine words for use in modern conversations or their modern definitions. Useful for historical reference or as a curiousity? Sure. Useful in an argument about what is or isn’t a word while commenting on the internet? Not so much.

Third, with such an old, printed dictionary, it’s hard for anyone to verify whether this is true or not. Most people don’t have 60+-year-old Oxford dictionaries lying around or even in their local libraries. Heck, by your own admission, you currently lack ready access to that dictionary. For all we know, you could be making it all up. At the very least, you could give us an actual definition for us to reverse-search online, or an example of a dictionary people are more likely to be able to access, but you refuse. You apparently won’t even try to use online resources out of snobbishness or distrust, but if they did have “sub-conscience”, that would be fairly convincing evidence in your favor. That you can’t or won’t gives us reason to doubt.

Finally, you’re relying on your memory of what this old dictionary supposedly said. But memory is a fickle thing. Are you familiar with the Mandela effect? Lots of people were sure he died while in prison when his death was actually within the past couple of decades (I forget the exact year) after he left his elected office as President of South Africa and long after he left prison. It applies to other things too. I and many others have strong memories of a children’s book series being called “The Berenstein Bears” (with an e like “Einstein“), but it’s actually called “The Berenstain Bears” (with an a like “stain”). Despite the fact that I now know how it’s actually spelled and having seen countless pieces of irrefutable evidence that my memory was simply wrong, I can still clearly remember that the books were called “The Berenstein Bears” with an e. Human memory simply isn’t that reliable. It’s entirely plausible that you have a distinct memory of reading that 60+-year-old Oxford dictionary and finding “sub-conscience” or “subconscience” in there. However, your memory could very well be playing tricks on you. Maybe you saw “subconscious” and are simply remembering it wrong. I don’t know. But I’m not about to rely on what you say you remember once reading in a more-than-half-a-century-old dictionary that you say you can’t find and that I can’t readily look up myself, especially when I have good reason to doubt it and you won’t even give a definition for it.