Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Ruthie in One Big Happy continues her grappling with English vocabulary:

You might think that outrageous and contagious are not very close phonologically — /awtr/ vs. /kǝnt/ — but they are rhyming trisyllables in a very small lexical space: courageous is the only other such word of any frequency. So in the lexicon that Ruthie might have been exposed to, they are very close indeed.

This entry was posted on January 7, 2015 at 4:33 am and is filed under Errors, 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.