In an earlier episode, we played a game in which we raised the ante on words with hidden “numbers” inside them. For example, forever became five-ever. Many listeners wrote to share Victor Borge’s hilarious Inflationary Language video along the same lines. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Inflationary Language”
A few weeks ago our quiz guy John Chinesky gave a quiz called just one more and he was talking about the fact that he has a friend who likes to say five ever, which is even longer than four ever.
Well, we got a whole lot of responses to that and quite a few of you said that if we like that quiz, we’d love the video of the late comedian Victor Borga on that same topic.
He calls it inflationary language, noticing that there are parts of numbers in words like wonderful. It’s a tuteful. It’s tuteful.
And I watched the video and it is really funny and I just want to share one little passage from it. He says, tenderly should be elevenderly. A lieutenant would be a lute elevenant. A sentence like, I ate a tenderloin with my fork, would be, I nine an elevenderloin with my fife. And so on, and so fifth.
I loved his stuff when I was a kid. He had this whole routine at the piano where he did the punctuation, where he would make the sound effects for the punctuation as he read it. Right. Question mark. Yeah.
Victor Borga, check out his videos online. And call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org, and come find us on Facebook and Twitter.
