Drive up ATM's OT, OOP (was Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Languages)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Daniel Myers:
><geek type=linguistic>
>Don't know about the couth/uncouth thing, but there actually is a
>difference between flammable and inflammable.  Flammable means "will burn",
>but inflammable means "can become inflamed".  For example wood is flammable
>but not inflammable, but gasoline is both.
></geek>
>
>My favorite linguistic quirk is a process known as "back derivation".  This
>is where a word is introduced into a language that sounds like a particular
>part of speech (but isn't) and corresponding forms are then developed.

How are you on gratuitous pronunciation changes, as in SU'baru (the
Japanese car manufacturer) being changed to su-bar-OO (this may
simply be a correction applied over time, but one wonders why the
necessity ever existed), the NBC-TV journalist John Chancellor
becoming John Chancell-OR, and, of course, Ronald Ree-gan (which he
was for like the first  65 years of his life) becoming Ronald Ray-gun.

These keep me awake at night. But actually, "effort" used as a verb
("we are efforting to find the cause of the problem") and "grow the
economy" annoy me more.

>A perfect example of back derivation is the word "pea".  In period, the
>word "pease" was introduced into English (from French, I think) as a
>partitive noun (like butter - you can have "some butter" but you can't have
>"a butter".

You can't? We have butter, apple butter, almond butter, cashew
butter, cocoa butter, beurre blanc, clarified butter etc. Isn't one
of them "a butter"? Isn't "a butter" acceptable as a shorter
alternative to "one of several types of butter"? I admit it would be
a stretch if all the non-standard butters were pseudo-butters, like
apple butter, but that's not the case.

>  This was because peas were served essentially like a
>porridge).  To the ear of English speakers though, the word "pease" sounds
>like a plural noun, so they started referring to the individual item within
>the pod as "a pea".
>
>There.  I managed to work it around to a period topic after all.

Ah. You mean "pant" used as a noun, to denote a single garment
covering the legs, abdomen, and buttocks. Plural is "pants". That's a
biggie in mail-order catalogues, L.L. Bean, places like that.

Adamantius, who once had a rule of thumb that stated that the SCA's
period ends when all men wear pants...