Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Well, spreading usages:

The discourse marker so in sentence-initial position has been around for a long time and seems to have been frequent for about a hundred years (discussion by Mark Liberman here).

The pronunciation ek cetera has also been around for some time. Webster’s New World Guide to Pronunciation complained about it in 1984 (and many have complained about it since then), but the pronunciation surely goes back long before then; I have recollections of hearing it from friends in the early 1960s, but unfortunately such memories are unreliable. (MWDEU in 1989 provides an explanation for it.)

Here’s a Zippy about it from 11/23/06:

Nucular comes up in Zippy cartoons every so often.

This entry was posted on March 7, 2011 at 9:11 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics. 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.