(Very much a brief MQoS Not Dead Yet posting on my part, while I cope with a complex posting on the wonders of VPE in English)
In an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning, two of the kids — Ruthie and the neighbor boy James — undertake to go on a dinosaur hunt, expecting the creatures to be easy to find because, according to James, they’re a stink:
Ruthie’s grandfather is about to explain to James the difference between extinct and a stink
Once again, the kids are coping with unfamiliar, technical vocabulary by interpreting it, eggcornishly, as more familiar material. Something of a stretch in this case, though extinct and a stink are indeed phonologically similar. I do wonder if there have been kids who reinterpreted extinct this way, or whether Rick Detorie (the cartoonist) merely imagined a reinterpretation that might have happened. Oh, the things that might have been!
(The adjective extinct is historically a specialized variant of extinguished, so calls to mind the vivid image of these creatures having their flame of life quenched, put out.)
March 21, 2024 at 6:02 am |
For what it’s worth, as a child growing up in New York (whose license plates used to identify it as the “Empire State”) in a household that watched a lot of baseball, I thought for some time that the official who called balls and strikes was an “empire”.
March 21, 2024 at 6:33 am |
Nice. The idea is that if [unfamiliar] umpire > [familiar] empire (for a NY kid), why not [unfamiliar] extinct > [familiar] a stink (for James (and Ruthie))?