[Ads-l] this one's not in the database

[Laurence Horn]

Caption from a poster on local telephone poles (photo of Oscar and caption available upon request):

MISSING:  Hamden—West Rock Area
"Oscar" - friendly but skiddish
Call...

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I'm assuming this is indeed an eggcorn.  Oscar as depicted in the accompanying photo is a small dog who presumably goes skidding away if you approach him too quickly, and the "skit" of "skittish" can't really be synchronically analyzed.  Alternatively, of course, it could just be a misspelling by someone who doesn't assume a relationship between "skiddish" and "skid".  Hard to know for sure.  

Equal time for kitty-cats:  there's the problem, which we may or not have discussed here, that while we can speak of "cat porn" (as e.g. at https://twitter.com/catpornx) as an instance of the non-pornographic "X porn" meme as in food porn, travel porn--and we can even post examples of "kitty porn" (as at http://hyperallergic.com/177690/woodcut-kitty-porn-of-the-edo-period/), the latter can't be referred to in spoken discourse, unless one carefully avoids flapping one's intervocalic alveolars.  At least I'd be too skiddish to try.


LH 

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