Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my brief treatment of The Ants Are My Friends, I neglected to mention this bit from the book (p. 11):

There are panels throughout [the book] where I’ve put together similar examples or sources of mishear or mis-speak …

This has mishear and mis-speak as mass nouns zero-derived from the verbs mishear and mis-speak (try not to worry about the hyphenation). News to me, but then I’m always coming across new stuff.

Now I see that there are count nounings as well:

In any case, the number of syllables in “if you could close the gimmick” don’t match up with the audio. This is clearly a mis-hear. (link)

Just noticed what I think was a mis-hear: … (link)

At least Mrs. Bush can claim possible senility for some mis-speaks. (link)

SOME MIS-SPEAKS BY SPOKESMEN OF THE LORD (link)

Nouning marches on.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2009 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Conversion, Morphology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.