More on "calvary"

James Harbeck jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA
Thu Apr 26 02:27:42 UTC 2007


>I had a linguistics professor who wrote and said mesolect and
>basilect but wrote and said acrolet -- i.e., without the c, that word
>only.

And yes, I know, that's not metathesis or some other kind of
displacement, it's just good ol' deletion. But it's an educated
speaker who you'd think would know better... I didn't figure out how
he managed to make that one. But he did it consistently. I, of
course, was not sure exactly how to go about pointing out the error...

I heard "larnyx" (or, I think, "larynyx") on a TV miniseries in the
1980s called V, about aliens who were "visiting" the earth but
actually planning to take over -- the context was a human instructing
his fellow resistance forces on the use of a device to emulate the
voices of the Visitors. I believe he said that it would "reverberate
against your larynyx" -- so a double-header: reverberate and larynyx.

James Harbeck.

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