Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my collection of linguistic errors (from both speech and writing) there are some of the telescoping, or “jump ahead” variety. Recently, in writing about young men judged to be twinkalicious / twinkilicious / etc., I was especially afflicted by this sort of error, in typing and in handwritten text. The sequence LI CI kept tempting me towards jumping ahead from the L to the I following the C, thus telescoping the sequence to LI and giving twinkalious etc. Very annoying.

Then there’s telescoping as an inadvertent error in speech — for instance, in two instances of Barack Obama inadvertently telescoped to Barama (and then corrected), as reported in this posting.

(Telescoped portmanteaus are also frequently committed intentionally, as in verminfestation ‘vermin infestation’ and teenius ‘teen genius’, reported in this posting.)

This entry was posted on June 14, 2013 at 7:05 am and is filed under Errors, Portmanteaus, Telescopings. 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.