h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Actually, what I meant was.. I read the word brooch in a story and didn't realise it was the same word as the spoken word brooch. So I still read as 'brootch' then correct myself.

I used to think it was, "to all intensant purposes" - whatever "intensant" should be I have no idea.

The joys of nonliteracy. When the Northern Ireland politicians decided a few weeks back to make common cause with their enemies (both sides having spittingly repulsed the moderates decades ago) one of the local commentators said that this was a monumentous day.

>> ...read the word brooch in a story and didn't realise it was the same word...<<


Yeah that one always got me too! Of course as a Canuck I simply decided that it was a Scottish thing, both phonetically and holding-up-your-kilt-wise.


Of course, I should have looked it up years ago.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/broach

A very interesting read that link. Never realised that beer tapping and boat capsising were invovled. Sad to note however that they don't mention 'breach' or 'britches' which now implicitly linked on more than one level.


~jwf~

*drifts in in a way which he hopes makes some sense*

My family has a tendency to *deliberately* mispronounce things - sometimes presumably because one of my older siblings genuinely did as a child, but as the youngest it just served to confuse me a little.

"Picture-skew" for "picturesque" is one favourite, and I've done the "mizzled" one too. Mind you, the Radio 2 DJ Sarah Kennedy does it a bit too - she's always on about coll-ee-arg-wees (colleagues) and so forth. (Erk, too late, can't remember any more examples...)

'Mizzled' appears to be quite a common (semi?) deliberate misuse.

In 'How Green Was My Valley', a schoolchild is beaten for pronouncing 'misled' as 'myzled'. He complains that he shouldn't be punished for trying to expand his vocabulary through literature.

Deliberate pismernunciations ((c) Ronnie Barker). Yes...I do this quite often. Unfortunately, the only one I can bring to mind at the moment is rather boring: 'SiMULTtenously'. I'll see if I can catch myself with any others.

I do malapropisms too:
Strangled Eggs
...with toast under the gorrila...
and Earl Hines tea.

A visual equivalent: the first web community I contributed to was alt.folklore.urban where traditional misspellings arose such as "cow orker" (someone had unintentionally added a space once, and it stuck) and also the use of "voracity" to mean "veracity". Newbies who corrected these abusages were mildly ragged for it.

I peculiar difference between Scots English and English English.

In English English, bras and poetry uplift.

In Scots English, it's refuse collectors who uplift. I've just phoned the council to arrange a 'special uplift' of the contents of my shed.

We have a Playtex Cross-Your-Heart recycling firm; it lifts and separates.

accidental misspellings on the web becoming purposeful misspellings are an interesting area, albeit it not one with overlky much depth. They clearly are used as a means of showing that you are part of the in-crowd. Knowledge of what they mean, what the backstory was and when to use them are key parts of being a member of the community.

Although misspelling doesn't come up so often as an affectation on here, in terms of in-crowds, various other language bits do.

The one I most remember from usenet was 'rouge' as a misspelling of 'rogue'. Hence you'd have rouge diallers, rogue ISPs, rouge admins etc.

Same I suppose with things like using 'pwned' instead of 'owned' in various circles.

Then I suppose there's the localised phrase affectations. Such as C&C warnings in usenet groups (standing for Coffee & Cats warning indicating that you'll laugh so hard the cat'll leap off your lap and you'll end up spilling your coffee everywhere) or even the use of 'elvised' and 'n*********r' on here.

I wonder how much affectation and a desire to use language to identify oneself as part of a specific group (or to create such a group) plays into the development of regional accents and dialects and so forth, or whether that is a sub conscious thing?

I also wonder, if it does have any part thereof, whether online communities could potentially end up with their own dialect that includes no pronunciation guide, just the specific words it uses? Although I guess isnce most people have some RL interaction it is unlikely to happen.

eschews all references to d*gs and their dangly bits and some of us could prove at length that cobblers don't make ropes. Knowing full well that much should be explained to anyone who joined post Rupert, I still feel very very slightly irritated when I have to

<>

I'm now going to make things even more confusing by mentioning that while it's pronounced 'britches' the proper spelling is 'breeches'.

>I wonder how much affectation and a desire to use language to identify oneself as part of a specific group (or to create such a group) plays into the development of regional accents and dialects and so forth, or whether that is a sub conscious thing?<

I became convinced some time ago that all accents are assumed. Around puberty we take on a persona that we generally keep for life. Popular actors are guardians of 'real' local isms. Curious, ain't it?

<> (Vestboy)

Gosh - you're the Quote of the Day, Vestboy!

It also reminds me of many many moons ago when my younger sister had a job as a secretary for a law firm and she would type letters that had been dictated on tape. I had to straighten her out one day when I saw she'd typed 'to all intensive purposes'.

az

>>I became convinced some time ago that all accents are assumed.

I'm not sure whether this is a) a powerful insight or b) stating the bleedin' obvious. It goes without saying that there is no neutral, tabula rasa accent. We assume the identity of the group we live amongst. Sometimes this is by default. Sometimes it's an ecological 'choice': the working class kid who has to smooth out the parental accent in order to get on. (Or, in some cases, to survive: My own native scouse was belittled out of me by teachers).

The puberty threshold is debatable, though. In my time I've met various Zeligs who frequently mutate their accents. In my own case, some English (and, increasingly, Scots) people now assume I'm Scottish. And then there's the well-known phenomenon of register-shifting: having one accent for best and another for everyday. In some cases, people can slip back into their native register after years of pretense.

By what name do we know pustular eruptions of sebum, as commonly found on the faces of adolescents?

The reason I ask is not simply due to a specialist interest in matters corporeal (see A4113811). Elsewhere, someone used the word 'plook' - not realising that this is a common Scots word for such things.

Probably 'spot' is the most common. Then there's 'blackhead'.
A curious one is 'zit'. This was once a peculiar Americanism. But its British use (ahem) exploded when it was popularised by the comedian Jasper Carrott in the late 1970's. Soon it became pretty much standard.

Any others?

Spot, zit and (plook)pluke are all familiar to me. Bleb was another one I used as a teenager.

turvy

a perhaps rather more unsavoury and incorrect term from my childhood specifically refering to a teenage zit which starts to bleed of its own accord (i.e. not one you've mangled in front of the mirror). This was known as 'gyp bleed' where gyp is as per the first syllable of 'gypsy'. Now, whether there was connection there or not I don;t know. There was a kid nicknamed gipo (profanity filter didn't like that!) (not a gypsy or romany or traveller kid at all, can;t remember where it came from now) and I seem to recall the name may have come from him (sorry if you're reading this! Wasn;t me that coined it!).

but other than that, the others are about right but have never heard 'plook' or variation before.

More pointy things!

Brooch and broach if not quite the same word now, once were and meant 'pointy thing' in general, but especially teeth it seems.

Acme also means 'pointy thing', but via a mispelling (intentional affectation or otherwise) seems to have yielded the word acne.

Yeah, pointy thingies!
Like needles and awls and spikes and pikes that poke holes in stuff like tartans and leather and beer barrels. So, what most people would call a broach today is really just the frontal decoration on the pin (broach) that holds it all together.

Larger holes in larger things like fortress walls are called breeches. Which begets the question why is that whatever holds up britches is probably from broaches and not breeches.

And while we will broach a subject, no matter how indelicately, we usually draw a line at a breech of protocol.


~jwf~