words and humor
One of my clients uses the word "gizzy" where I would say "thingamajig" or "watchamacallit." What amazes me is how immediately comprehensible this is. Do we have a word for words that are gibberish and stand in for other words that we can't summon up? I don't mean onomatopoeia or euphemisms, though both sort of glance off the edges of what I mean.
I saw a T-shirt the other day. It was grey with a slightly darker grey silhouette of a rooster, with big lettering in an old-country-fair type font that said "Free Rides." It took me three glances to get it. Nice. I appreciate the subtly crass humor of that. Really blatently crass is just obnoxious, but I thought that was funny.
I'm reading a book that Russ left behind when he packed up his books from the house. It's called Made in America: an Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson. Two of my favorite tidbits so far: Goodbye is contracted from "God be with you" and was originally spelled Godbwye. Woodchuck has nothing to do with "wood" or "chuck"; it was a transliteration of a Native American name for the creature that was pronounced more like wuchak, with a very hard stop at the end.
I saw a T-shirt the other day. It was grey with a slightly darker grey silhouette of a rooster, with big lettering in an old-country-fair type font that said "Free Rides." It took me three glances to get it. Nice. I appreciate the subtly crass humor of that. Really blatently crass is just obnoxious, but I thought that was funny.
I'm reading a book that Russ left behind when he packed up his books from the house. It's called Made in America: an Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson. Two of my favorite tidbits so far: Goodbye is contracted from "God be with you" and was originally spelled Godbwye. Woodchuck has nothing to do with "wood" or "chuck"; it was a transliteration of a Native American name for the creature that was pronounced more like wuchak, with a very hard stop at the end.