Today’s Bizarro:
Don Piraro is a great pun fan — mostly imperfect puns, as in this case, where miner and mimer are phonologically distinct, but also phonologically very close, differing only in the segments /n/ and /m/, which are only one (position) feature apart.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns | 1 Comment »
Today’s Zits has Sara continuing to enchant Jeremy with her language:
Three things: Eggs Benedick (with /kt/ > /k/ — syllable-final “t/d-deletion”, very common in casual speech), holiday sauce (an eggcorn for hollandaise sauce), and ezackly (a repeat from the previous installment of the strip). Holiday sauce is the prize.
Posted in Eggcorns, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology | 7 Comments »
Today’s Zits, in which Sara enchants Jeremy with her language:
It’s a triple play: the eggcorn cold slaw, the pronunciation ezackly, and the idiom blend Achilles’ tooth.
Posted in Blends, Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology | 10 Comments »
In the account of the band Here We Go’s encounter with John Waters, here, we find:
But the truth is we actually picked him up hitchhiking. It was a complete and utter coincident.
with coincident for coincidence. This is far from an isolated example, so we have to conclude that this is a reanalysis, perhaps an eggcornish one based on the existing word coincident and encouraged by the possibility of final cluster simplification in English (in this case, the simplification of final [ts] to [t]).
Posted in Eggcorns, Language change, Morphology, Phonology | 4 Comments »
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns, Variation | 4 Comments »
Damien Hall on the Variationist List today noted that the Queen’s Christmas Message will soon be upon us, and pointed to research on changes in the Queen’s variety of English over the years, using these broadcast messages as data.
The way the press reported this research is a story in its own right.
Posted in Language in the news, Phonology, Sociolinguistics | 3 Comments »
In the tradition of my Chicken Verdicchio, Peking on Mystic, and musical memories postings, more recollections of the Boston area in the early 60s. Something of a focus on food and dining, with occasional linguistic interludes.
Posted in Comparison, Language and food, Memory, My life, Phonology, Syntax, Variation | 7 Comments »
(Warning: This posting will wander some.)
It started with a story in New Scientist (online 11/17/11, in print 11/19/11): Chelsea Whyte’s:
Cannibal shrimp shows its romantic side
In order: (1) the interpretation and accenting of cannibal shrimp; (2) the tale of the cannibal shrimp (no linguistics to speak of here); (3) cleaner shrimp; (4) CRSs and their potential for cannibalism; (5) CRS shrimp and other instances of RAS syndrome; (6) orphan initialisms.
Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Initialisms, Morphology, Peeving, Phonology, Pleonasm | 4 Comments »
Heard a few minutes ago in a cellphone ad on television — unfortunately, I didn’t catch which phone was being advertised — references to 4G phones, with 4G pronounced
(1) /ˈfɔrʤi/
rather than
(2) /ˌfɔrʤˈi/
So, like fourgy, which I recognize as a portmanteau of four and orgy.
Posted in Phonology, Portmanteaus | 5 Comments »
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Poetic form, Portmanteaus | 4 Comments »
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