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

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    I was watching one of those nature shows once, and the narrator was
discussing iguanas (ig-wannas) until they interviewed Prince Chuckie, who
referred to them as (ig-yew-annas). For the remainder of the show, the
narrator called them (ig-yew-annas) . . .

    Sieggy

-----Original Message-----


>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...
>
>
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