Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On Facebook yesterday about the on-line word game Spelling Bee:

— Polly Jacobson: on a free version (spellsbee) it wouldn’t accept ‘clitic’. (but oddly accepted ‘clit’)

— John Beavers > PJ:  I am still annoyed about clitic.

— PJ: oh I got ‘clitic’ rejected in a slightly different game. I guess they all have the same word list!

— AZ > PJ: As the author of “On Clitics” [Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club, 1977] and other works on clitology [see my survey paper, “What is a clitic?” (in Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, & Zwicky, Clitics Bibliography, 1995)] (and the proud owner of a Put Your Clitics in Second Position t-shirt), I would like to protest this enormity in the strongest of terms. … I see that my old t-shirt eventually devolved into rags after years of hard use. I have ordered a new, spiffier version, to be unveiled when it arrives in a week or so. Watch this space.

You don’t have to wait. Here’s the design as I created it (from a bewilderingly large menu of choices):

This entry was posted on May 10, 2023 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Clitics, Clothing, Language play, Syntax. 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.