Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the June 13th One Big Happy, Ruthie’s mother says seller, but Ruthie hears cellar:

(#1)

Ruthie knows about cellars ‘basements’ (or ‘underground storage rooms’), but apparently not about bestsellers.

She might or might not know the term salt cellar / saltcellar, for a container for storing salt, like this elegant olive wood number:

(#2)

And she’s almost surely not come across a salt-seller, like this fellow in a Mali salt market:

(#3) (BBC news photo)

(Basement cellar and salt cellar are historically two different words (the cell of the second is related to Latin sal ‘salt’).

This entry was posted on July 10, 2018 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, 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.