The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest column in the Malaysia Star is about words we say wrong on purpose. Update: There's a lively conversation on this topic now underway at Jason Kottke's blog.

...

There are, technically speaking, two Internets. One—Internet2—is used privately by universities, scientists, corporations, and the US government agencies.

The other, which we might call the plain vanilla Internet (meaning the most basic kind), is the one nearly everyone else in the world uses. It’s what most of us mean when we say “the Internet.”

However, a lot of people are now calling the regular Internet the Internets, plural, with an ‘s’ at the end. It takes only a little research to see that they are mimicking President George W. Bush who is on record as misspeaking this way. He said “Internets” instead of “Internet” in 2000 and again in 2004.

As a result, “Internets” is now a heavily entrenched word, a plural used where a singular is usual.

But why do some people say it that way?

For one thing, it pokes fun at the president, who is known for his disfluency (his inability to speak well).

It’s also meant to be slightly ironic and a bit self-deprecating. You can make fun of yourself by saying it that way.

People incorrectly say words on purpose all the time. My wife says aminal instead of “animal” and maters instead of “tomatoes.”

I sometimes say “muscles” so that the ‘c’ has a ‘k’ sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of “computer” (after Ned Beatty’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Mr Luthor” in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of “remember” because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

My wife and I both sometimes say chimbly instead of “chimney,” fambly instead of “family,” and liberry instead of “library.” Like maters, these are common enough pronunciations that many Americans wouldn’t notice we were saying them any differently from anyone else.

It’s not that my wife and I, or anyone who says Internets, are maroons (a humorous way of intentionally misrendering “moron”).

My wife is a linguist, after all, and I am a lexicographer (that is, a dictionary compiler and editor), and we both know how to speak in very correct formal English or even just up-to-snuff (meaning acceptable and passable) day-to-day English. We both know how to pronounce “library”; it just amuses us, sometimes, to say it another way.

People speak that way because saying a word wrong on purpose is a form of wordplay. It adds variety, colour, and whimsy to our speech. It’s a common characteristic of slang, which is partly built upon fooling around.

Perzackly and prezactly, for example, are wildly ridiculous pronunciations of the adverb “exactly.” The Oxford English Dictionary rightly marks them as being largely American and further indicates that they are representations of rural or southern speech.

That’s dictionary-writer’s talk, which means people spell the word to imitate the stereotypes of uneducated or unsophisticated folks. They’re trying to be funny or to make fun of someone, but you’ll find that they’re often purposely making fun of themselves, too.

A more common intentional misspeaking is beeswax which is used in the expression “mind your own beeswax!” which means “mind your own business!” It’s what you say when someone is trying to find out your secrets.

In this case, “beeswax,” which is a real word meaning the stuff with which bees make their honeycombs, is a malapropism. A malapropism is when you substitute a word with a similar-sounding one, although it’s usually accidental.

Many Americans also say coinkydink instead of coincidence. It’s sometimes spelled kwinkydink or kawinkydink and is almost always used in a light-hearted or goofy way. It refers to when two or more things happen in the same way, at the same time, at the same place, or to the same people in a way that is surprising. Although you know they’re not related, they seem to be. Coinkydinks are interesting but unimportant.

There are still more: one fell swoop, an idiom that means “an action that happens fast and all at once,” is often rendered as in one swell foop. That’s a spoonerism, where the first sounds of several words are swapped around to create a nonsensical expression.

Mercy buckets is a rendering of the French merci beaucoup, meaning “thank you very much.” People who say this usually know perfectly well that the French is not pronounced that way. They’re just practising a fake and exaggerated ignorance.

Ossifer is a created by metathesis from “officer,” meaning a police officer. Metathesis is when letters inside a word are swapped around, in this case in the way that a drunk person might do.

This word often accompanies long joke sayings in which many of the words are jumbled, such as, “Ossifer, I swear to drunk I’m not God”—the kind of thing you might say to a cop if you were likkered up (inebriated) and couldn’t speak normally.

Anyhoo (anyhow), there are many more of these, but I’ll save them for another time.

My wife and I have a habit of saying the name of the actress from Pirates of the Caribbean as Keira Kuh-Nightley—just for fun. And the Actress from Batman Returns as Michelle Puh-Feiffer.

Keira Kuh-Nightly is so common in our household that we once said it in front of a friend, who explained that her name was pronounced “Nightly.” Oops.

Although I had been receiving the Double-tongued entries, it wasn´t until now that I dared to read one of the above columns. As a Mexican -and Spanish language- native it is refreshing to know that we have many similarities when it comes to “word formation,” so to speak. While I lived in the States, I created so many of my own that I can’t recall them all. And yes, many of them in Spanglish even! For us it’s easier because we pronounce words the same way they are written, at least in Spanish. When it comes to Nahuatl, the Aztecs language, well, that’s another story…hahaha!!!

I had always thought of “prezactly” as an amalgamation of “precisely” and “exactly,” two words that mean the same thing in that context.

Tom Scharpling on the Best Show on WFMU does this all the time.  He says things like Eng-uh-land, animules, etc.

I’ve done this my whole life, mostly for a cheap laugh. But now that I have two preschoolers, my wife doesn’t think they’re as entertaining. In addition to several of your examples, here are a few of mine:
“Hub-sand” instead of “Husband”
“EK cetera” to exaggerate one of my pet peeves.
“Breakast” for “breakfast”
“Clean the chicken” instead of “clean the kitchen”
“Pre-martial counseling” instead of “Pre-marital counseling”
“shake a tower” instead of “take a shower”

This has had a few negative real-world effects. I received a terrible grade in high-school Spanish due to my exaggerated gringo pronunciations (“May Lamo Whan. Co Mo Ess-tes, Chee-ka?”). Hey, the cute girl next to me liked it, so it was a fair deal.

I’ve always spelled the moron variant in a way that preserves the initial “o.”

As Bugs would say, “What a mor-oon!”

I love to say CHOCOMUT instead of CHOCOLATE.  Mmmm Chocomut Ice Cream.

It is something I picked up from a beloved friend of mine who is no longer in our astral plane.  I also like to say “no longer in our astral plane” instead of “he died tragically and horribly and allow me to go into detail on this” but I know this is a euphemism and not a malapropism.

Loved the wordplay on ‘officer’ - ‘ossifer’. In Latin, ‘ossifer’ would mean ‘one who carries bones.’

Wordplay humour is a family tradition we often employ to mix results. While visiting cousins in the U.K. with my Father, our sophisticated English Uncle was compelled to apologizing to a waitress, “Please forgive them, they’re colonial”.

I suppose requesting “a mug of cabinet savvy-none, see view plate…mercy buckets” was overtly ignorant sounding. 

“Bon Voyaggee!” another favorite Bug Bunnyism.

skissors for scissors
cubumber for cucumber
pisghetti for spighetti
nucular for nuclear
a friend who takes great delight in saying just intercourse when she means social intercourse
bass ackwards for ass backwards
fiddlesticks and fudge for f**k

A long time ago, a friend of mine made a typo in an Internet discussion group, adding a space to “coworker” to make it “cow orker”. So a lot of us now habitually refer to coworkers (even when speaking aloud) as “cow orkers”.

“Flutterby” seems so much more descriptive than butterfly

My grandparents indignantly used to refer to certain tv shows and commercials as “fornographic.”

I picked up “for all intensive purposes” from grading undergraduate English papers.

The drunk who addresses the policeman as “Occifer” is also known in UK English to say, “Good consternoon, Aftable.”

In our household we call the thing we keep cold food in the “refrigulator”, or, more formally, the “refrigulation machine”.

I also call that stuff you make sandwiches out of “peemb-nut butter” (but I don’t keep it refrigulated.)

“Prezactly,” as someone stated before, has always been a portmanteau of “precisely” and “exactly,” and it goes well with its two siblings: Absotively, posilutely.

When my eldest son was just learning to speak, he was a big Disney fan, but he couldn’t pronounce most of the things he liked. To this day, that big-eared mouse is known in my household as “Mock-uh Moose.”

Oh, and we keep our milk in the frigifrator.

I should send your article to some former coworkers.  I have always enjoyed peppering my speech with “mal-improperisms,” but when I was working at a swanky university Up North, people would often correct what they thought were my errors.  Rather than upset their prejudices about iggorant Southerners, I would just give them a dopey look and say, “That’s what I said.”

I picked up a spoonerism in the service that’s still a treat to use—flexidly rigible (from a self-contradictory order that was to be followed in unfamiliar situations: to remain rigidly flexible).  I think the malapropism is as much fun as the original.

Peoplez on video game forums do this all time just for fun and coolness, although I can’t remember any example right now. By the way, aztecprincess’ comment reminds me how much we non-native speakers merge English into our language in our everyday online (and sometimes RL) speech.

A man who worked at a toy store once told me his grandson only wanted one thing for Christmas - a panurple bike. The poor man went all over town searching for a brand of bike named “Panurple” with no success. He felt pretty silly when it turned out the child only wanted a purple bike! Now I can’t even say the word purple. It always comes out panurple!

When my daughter was about four she created the word ambleyumps as in, “The ambleyumps took him to the hosipal.” 38 years later I still say ambleyumps, but I hardly ever say hosipal.

My wife and I use the term “fustercluck” as a spoonerism in place of the R-rated version, and use it to mean the same thing.

Our daughter couldn’t say properly say the word “hungry” at first—it always came out as “hungary” (like the country), with extra emphasis as a 3-syllable word, and we’ve been using it that way in our family ever since.

This is some great stuff…

The first one that came to mind for me is “fugly”.

Means “f**king ugly”.

The best example I ever heard was from an individual correcting someone else’s error.  He said “You put the accent on the wrong syl-LAB-ble.”

@William Mossner: I believe you meant to “put the em-FAH-sis on the wrong sy-LA-ble.” I picked this one up back in middle school, in Massachusetts, circa 1993.

@Jacob Levine: Your version is better. Mine was picked up circa 1958.  Perhaps it was embellished in 30+ years (or my memory faded).

One of my favorite answers to the query “How are you?” is “I are fine, how are you?”

During my growing up years I would succumb to fits of stubborness. My german grandmother would tell me to stop being a “dickhead”. It is a mixture of german and english. The word dick comes from the German for thick and the word head is, of course, English. The whole name in German would be dickkopf and in English it would be thick head.

Being young and innocent, I understood it as she meant it, that I was being stubborn or obtuse or both. It wasn’t until I got older that I found out there is another meaning for the word dick. Being a lover of words, it still makes me smile.

I believe I may have inherited my stubbornness from my grandmother as she lived to 107. She was just too stubborn to go.

In California there are so many Spanish names that get messed up. I grew up in Costa Mesa, (the e is a long a in Spanish), but became Costa Messa. As a teen I was in Yosemite (we fondly called it yo-za-might) with a YMCA group (Yimca). A woman asked where we were from and she said “Oh, that’s near the mission San Jew-wan Kah-PRIS-tah-no”. There is also the lovely La Jolla (mis pronounced like jolly, but should be hoya) a misspelling of the Spanish La Joya. Out east I work in El Kah-jone. (El Cajon). And everyone knows that to gamble, you can go to an Indian Casino, but the big game is Lost Wages, Nevada.

And I will never forgive Garrison Keillor for the show he did here and talked about the lovely Jar-can-das in bloom. When the Jacarandas bloom each May, I can hear him.

From my career in Early Childhood Education, there is of course basketti, (spaghetti), moke (milk) oo-ee’s (from a child with hearing loss who missed consonants) and the bride and broom at the wedding. At my son’s first movie, Aladdin, he decided he did not want to see that big blue genius.

On the Detroit-Redford border, we have a street that is widely mispronounced, so I immediately thought of how some folks say “Lasher” when the spelling is “Lahser”.  For some reason, that just drives me NUTS!!!  (And I have to correct it every single time)....

To keep me same, I have to believe it is one of two things:
a) they are not actually reading the sign but instead, repeating the word the way it was said to them
b) a LOT of folks are dyslexic

I wonder if this is the reason behind variant spellings such as “Aimee” vs “Amy” and others?

It seems that many people find new ways of saying things from the ways that young children say this. I believe this is the way “tummy” came into use: it’s kid-speak for “stomach”.

We have some in our family too. My yunger sister couldn’t pronounce the “sp” sound, so we got “pisc” (crisp) and “poon”. She also said “Mazagine” (Magazine, pronounced “Maz-ah-geeeeen”) which stuck.

As well as that, there’s skissors and skience, and hopsital, and em-ber-blope (envelope).

Long ago I heard an old woman tell her friend that she was going to see her doctor because she was suffering from a “gastric stomach”

I was recently corrected for using ‘bastid’ in place of ‘bastard’, although it was intentional…

I also like using the phonetic pronunciation of french-named food items, like ‘fillet MIG-non’ and es-CAR-gots… i like to call waiters garkon, as in “hey garkon, theres a snail in my escargots!”

For thank you in spanish I like to say grassy-ass.

I’m often corrected with how i use “v” instead of “b” in a word, like vuvvle instead of bubble..

I liked this post, and the comments. I’ll stumble it up.

I am surprised nobody mentioned “Feb oo ary”. I had a British colleague who pronounced it that way. (A (whole) nother colleague, Hungarian, always spoke of “you ROP’ian, i.s.o.”/euro’pean/.

Funny also that I, a nonnative speaker (being Dutch) always shake a tower.

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?