eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

The sports section of the Philadelphia Inquirer is fond of referring to the Philadelphia Eagles football team as the "Iggles".  This is not done to sneer at the literacy of local football fans but rather to give a feeling of "yes, we're local" to the readers.

If you ever see in print male ejaculate referred to as "kum", you can be sure you are reading a low-brow girlie magazine.

Perhaps not really eye dialect, but advertisers sometimes deliberately use phonetic spellings as eye-catchers, e.g. "Ken-l Ration".  "LUV" was used by at least two different firms, one for a brand of disposable diapers and one for an infant's car seat.

Occasionally such a deliberate misspelling will catch on.  Specifically "lite" was originally used (to the best of my recollection) as a come-on for somebody's sugar-free soft drink but has caught on to mean any diet drink, or more generally a diet food, and even by extension something with less than the normal caloric/intellectual/whatever load, e.g. sneering at someone's publication as "American Speech lite".

   - James A. Landau

PS:  I received a "Nigerian" e-mail (actually it was from Russia) soliciting me for a "mutual preposition".

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