While looking up the botanical term nut, I was taken to the page for the NuttyBuddy, a piece of protective athletic gear for men, combining a cup with compression shorts. That’s nut as in nuts ‘testicles’, with nutty a near or full rhyme (depending on your dialect) to buddy. News to me, though I did know about the ice cream cones called Nutty Buddies.
Archive for the ‘Phonology’ Category
NuttyBuddies and Nutty Buddies
March 21, 2013One Big Happy roundup
March 17, 2013twangs
March 7, 2013Widely reported back in January, for instance in this Los Angeles Times story, “Texas talk is losing its twang: Fewer Texans are speaking in the traditional dialect, as urbanization, pop culture and an influx of newcomers have conspired to displace the local language” (by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, 1/27/13). My interest here is the use of twang.
Syllabic approximants
March 3, 2013From a weekly report of the Bowman International School in Palo Alto, from the youngest class:
In science we are learning about the native plants of California. We are doing the Honeysucker, and Poppy.
(The writeups are taken down by older students acting as reporters.)
That would be honeysuckle, with a perceptual confusion of syllabic [r] and syllabic [l], the two segments being very close indeed phonetically (the difference between an unaccented rhotic and an unaccented lateral being very slight phonetically, especially since unaccented approximants are frequently “vocalized”, realized as vocalic offsets rather than actual approximants).
The Bayloo puzzle
March 1, 2013Over in Facebook, in the midst of a rambling discussion of dialect differences, Arne Adolfsen presented a phonological puzzle:
My sister-in-law who’s from here (the capital of Nowhere in northwestern Georgia) has a cat whose name she pronounces “Bayloo”, but when I call it that she has no idea what I’m talking about since the cat’s name is spelled “Betty Lou”. It’s really peculiar. My brother and I have to pronounce the name as three syllables with the TT (sounded like DD) in there or she and her sister and son have no idea that we mean the two-syllabled “Bayloo” they talk about.
Two issues here: where “Bayloo” (roughly [béylù], though the phonetic details will depend on fine details of Arne’s sister-in-law’s dialect) comes from; and why Arne’s sister-in-law doesn’t recognize his reproductions of her pronunciation (I’ll assume that his reproductions are close enough to accurate). The first question is easy; the second has a more complex, and much cooler, answer.
bb
February 2, 2013I recently bought a new hairbrush, which came labeled
BOAR BRISTLE
A wonderful compound, bristling with /b/s and growling with /r/s. I might be a linguist, but like everybody, I have my moments of sheer word appreciation, and I savor boar bristle.
Two cartoons
January 10, 2013Two language-related cartoons came by on Facebook a little while ago. One I think I understand pretty clearly — it involves a demi-eggcorn — but the other baffles me, not because of what it says (involving the glottal stop), but because I don’t understand why the character who speaks is saying it.
greeblies
December 23, 2012A story from almost 50 years ago, in Cambridge MA, in which a young woman talks with exasperation about the slapdash housekeeping skills of some male friends of hers sharing an apartment in Cambridge. One of them had done a load of laundry, washing, along with a lot of dark clothes, a brand-new fuzzy yellow garment, with the predictable unfortunate outcome that, as she put it:
*Everything* was covered with little yellow greeblies!
Ann and I hadn’t heard the word greeblies before, but from the context and the word’s sound, it was clear what the greeblies were: little bits of fluff (which attached themselves unwelcomely to other things). And when we told the story to others, no one had any problem dealing with the unfamiliar word.
(Greeblies are relevant in my life right now, because I’m washing my new plush bathrobe, which has shown some tendency to shed the occasional greebly here and there, and has to be washed on its own, not even with other dark-colored clothes, so as not to risk a plague of dark blue greeblies. Not for me the mistake of those guys back in Cambridge.)
And it seems that people have invented this noun (and the similar noun greeble), independently, many times, using the phonosemantic resources of English to craft a new word that vividly suggests the image they have in mind.
Pocket reference to half-rhyme
December 21, 2012Woke up this morning — Solstice Day — to the distinctive sound of Tom Waits‘s voice singing his own “Ol ’55”, with the haunting chorus:
Now the sun’s coming up,
I’m riding with Lady Luck,
Freeway cars and trucks,
Stars beginning to fade,
And I lead the parade.
Words that seem to suggest all sorts of interpretive possibilities, but certainly begin with a kind of pocket reference guide to types of half-rhyme: the first three lines, rhyming up, luck, and trucks, illustrate feature rhyme (up vs. luck, with /p/ vs. /k/, two voiceless stops differing only in the feature of point of articulation and so “sounding alike”) and subsequence rhyme (luck vs. trucks, with /k/ vs. /ks/, the first being a subsequence of the second and so, again, “sounding alike”).
The gay underwear anthem
December 16, 2012[Mostly about queer sexiness and gay sex, but with comments on poetic form.]
Heard dimly across the room, a song with an insistent chorus that was apparently about bluesy underwear (or, just possibly, boozy underwear). On my iTunes, but it struck no chord of memory for me. I came closer, and it resolved itself into Pansy Division singing “Groovy Underwear” (originally on Deflowered, then in the collection The Essential Pansy Division). Ah, the gay underwear anthem, a theme song for my underwear postings.