Archive for the ‘Spelling’ Category
October 21, 2024
This morning’s query from Benita Bendon Campbell:
Have you “done” Flanders and Swann’s “I’m a gnu”? (León Hernández Alvarez’s I have a new brought it to mind.)
(that is, L’s report in my 10/20 posting “I have a ##”)
But of course. Among my gnu postings there’s my 3/14/12 “The news for gnus”, where I wrote:
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
I can’t think of gnus without being reminded of Flanders and Swann’s delightful Gnu Song — which you can hear here, along with photos of real-life gnus. The lyrics: [in full in the 2012 posting]
An elaborate play on silent letters in English spelling: “restoring” the G of GNU and GNASH, the K of KNOW, and the W of WHO, with the initial /g/ of /gǝnú/ spilling over onto /n/-initial nicest, nature, neither, not, even know, and, most marvelously, the climactic (a)nother. (Plus “Cockney” initial /h/ in elk and ain’t.)
Posted in Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spelling | 2 Comments »
September 24, 2024
Mike Pope on Facebook yesterday, about this banner on e-mail that had come to him:
— MP: I mean, wtf is “Zix®” and why would this banner across an email in any way reassure me about anything?
Followed by this exchange between Mike and me:
— AZ > MP: Ordinarily, I’d expect you to look it up yourself, but as a Z-person (and indeed as Zot, son of Zip), I had to check it out myself. To discover that …
Zix Email Encryption is now Webroot™ Advanced Email Encryption powered by Zix™
— MP > AZ: I CAN look it up, but I’m playing the part of Ordinary Email User here, for whom something like this banner is … nothing. … If I were spoofing/phishing emails, it would be very easy to add this same banner to my outbound emails to provide an illusion of security.
I take Mike’s point here, but will now forge on to something completely different, in a substantial alphabetic digression inspired by the trade name Zix, which manages to pack two association-rich letters from the end of the alphabet, Z and X, into a monosyllable.
But first, a note that the encryption company was not the first to see the imaginative potential in a Z…X name.
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Books, Names, Nicknames, Signs and symbols, Spelling, Trade names | 3 Comments »
September 18, 2024
From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead
South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes
(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)
Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.
(more…)
Posted in Inflection, Music, Puns, Sociolinguistics, Spelling, Usage, Usage advice, Variation | 6 Comments »
July 24, 2024
Now we sing, to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”:
What shall we do with the leftover pie dough? … …
Cut it into slabs and then you bake them.
Do that, and you get the yummy stuff that Ann Daingerfield Zwicky called piecrust crumblies (a family term whose origin was lost to her); she used that name, so I did too, and my guy Jacques, and probably Elizabeth (Daingerfield Zwicky) as well, so maybe now Opal (Armstrong Zwicky) too. Such things get passed around.
(Spelling note: I will use the solid spelling piecrust, but many writers use the separated spelling pie crust; these are stylistic variants, and are listed as such by, among other sources, NOAD.)
Now it turns out that there’s a term of culinary art for the stuff; food writers seem to call them piecrust treats — a specialization of NOAD‘s
noun treat: an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure: he wanted to take her to the movies as a treat.
Whatever you call them, they’re just one possible answer to the question in my title, so let’s survey the uses of leftover piecrust dough.
(more…)
Posted in Folklore, Language and food, Music, My life, Names, Parody, Spelling | 4 Comments »
July 24, 2024
Posted on Facebook on 7/19 by James Fell: a riff of 12 risonyms on the name Benedict Cumberbatch (on the occasion of his 48th birthday) — 12 risible names scattered over a factual, plainly told, account of BC’s life, which begins at the beginning:
Today in history, July 19, 1976, Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch was born in London, England.
and then immediately refers to BC with a preposterous risonym:
Both of Benzedrine Cloacalsplotch’s parents were actors, and his grandfather served as a submarine officer in both world wars.
I’ll reproduce the whole thing below. But first some context.
(more…)
Posted in Actors, Jokes, Language play, Names, Phonology, Poetic form, Spelling | 1 Comment »
July 21, 2024
— For Vicki Fromkin, may her memory never grow less
ATMIDDEDLY for ADMITTEDLY, in my typing up a posting a couple of days ago. Which is, first of all, an (inadvertent) exchange of the consonant letters D and T. And then involves maintaining the positions for single vs. doubled consonant letters, in the frame
Aℒ1MIℒ2ℒ2EDLY (where ℒi is a variable over letters)
A complex error that highlights the kind of mental planning that goes on in writing or typing text: I had to choose the two letters ℒ1 and ℒ2 (and get them in the right order); and at the same time choose which one of them is single and which doubled. (For a refreshing change from some of the other spelling errors I’ve looked at recently, this one has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the positions of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard.)
(more…)
Posted in Errors, Language production, Psycholinguistics, Spelling, Typos | 4 Comments »
June 11, 2024
That would be old original Z-Man, who is now (according to today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip) your flight-empowered guide into the pop-cultural past:
(#1) The first of (at least) three incarnations of Z-Man since he entered the Zippyverse in 2005
As a Z-person, I am especially attentive to words with Z in them (like whizz), especially names (like Buzz and Graz), especially names beginning with Z (like Zelda, Zorn, and Zorro). So Zippy and his superhero Z-Man characters catch my eye and get my attention, independently of the absurdist attractions of the strip (and, in the case of #1, without regard for my appreciation of the Marx Brothers, Ida Lupino, and Daffy Duck).
(more…)
Posted in Cartoon conventions, Color, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2024
Passed on by Lisa Cohen on Facebook on 6/2: a bulletin about the world’s largest perogy, in Glendon AB. From the Atlas Obscura site, in “Giant Perogy… Roadside tribute to a staple of eastern European cuisine”, published on 9/5/10:
In 1993, Glendon, a village in Alberta …, unveiled its roadside tribute to the perogy. The town’s [fiberglass and steel] Giant Perogy, complete with fork, stands 27 feet tall, weighs approximately 6,000 pounds, and is considered one of the “Giants of the Prairies,” a collection of massive sculptures that can be found across this geographic region of North America.
The fork was added to the sculpture so that people would have some idea as to what it was supposed to be. The first design, without the fork, left passersby baffled. “The first design wasn’t [with] a fork, but then people went by and they responded that it looked like a cow pie or something,” said Johnny Demienko, who dreamed up the sculpture when he worked as the town’s mayor and also a school bus driver.
Apparently, a Perogy Cafe, serving “Ukrainian and Chinese perogies”, was located next to the sculpture for some years.
To come: photos of Glendon’s Giant Perogy; the spelling PEROGY; for comparison to the Glendon dumpling, actual pierogies; the Giants of the Prairies.
(more…)
Posted in Art, Language and food, Polish, Pop culture, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
May 31, 2024
To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Color, Homosexuality, Language play, Memes, Modification, Puns, Rainbow, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
September 26, 2023
We start with wine, a drink whose enthusiasts, knowledgable fans, aficionados, connoisseurs, and the like are legion, so not surprisingly we have a name for them, with alternative spellings: oenophiles / enophiles. Beer is equally appreciated and enjoyed by many, but there are relatively few beer connoisseurs. But, even if there are few of them, they presumably have a name — maybe an obscure one, but a name nevertheless. What’s the solution to this proportional equation?
wine : oenophile :: beer : X
It turns out that there are (at least) two solutions for X, one Latin-based (like vinophile for wine, which is so rare that it doesn’t make it even into the OED), the other Greek-based like oenophile (Greek to accord with the Greek second element –phile). You’re unlikely to have come across either of them, but the second, Greek-based one, is especially delicious for me, because it’s a Z -word (like Zwicky), and because it came to me through a Facebook friend, Martyn Cornell.
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Greek, Language and food, Spelling | 3 Comments »
