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I enjoyed this week 's filler about words we like to mis pronounce. One of our enduring family favorites comes to mind from the time I moved from stay-at-home mom to chauffeur for our children and their activities. To satisfy this out-of-house lifestyle, I often cooked tuna noodle casserole ahead for those road-trip days. For some reason the words, tuna noodle casserole, early became an object of play and forever turned onto Castle Noodle Toodlerole. J. Giannini
Restaurant names, and other trademarks, may be in a different category, but I'm reminded of a recent surprise. Back when I was only a year or three out of college, say in the mid '70s, I worked in Greensboro, NC, where there is a restaurant called Tex and Shirley's. I had a coworker who routinely referred to it as Tex and Squirrely's, and so we all did. But almost 40 years later I used that name when talking to my daughter and she knew exactly what restaurant I was talking about. I suppose the name may be close enough to the original that it wasn't much of a stretch, but I don't think I had cause to use the term while she was growing up and I haven't heard it elsewhere around the city. Yet she must have heard it somewhere.
telemath said:
Scolari's => Scary Larry's
Radio Shack => Rip Shack or Radio Shaft
After they started selling their TRS-80 computers, I often heard Trash Shack.
BTW, RadioShack has no spaces and is an example of CamelCase.
Emmett
Well, the topic is eye-catching and the examples given are very interesting. However, I wonder what the causes of mispronouncing some words are. Can I call them "part of idiolect' from linguistic point of view? Or, do they "strengthen" the borderline between British and American English? Can the words mispronounced get a strong foothold in the language, or will they die out in course of time?
By the way, all that stuff is so interesting that it could be investigated. Are there any steps being or having been taken?
Asusena
Bob Bridges said:
Emmett doesn't spell it out, but I'm sure he remembers that the TRS-80 was often called, in my circles, the "Trash-80". The appellation is unfair, but nerds are as enchanted by snobbery as anyone else.
And the Dot Matrix Printer that went with it was a "DMP", which we pronounced "Dump".
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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