LL-L 'Language humor' 2007.01.18 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 17 January 2007 - Volume 04

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Funny foreign' 2007.01.18 (03) [E]

> From: Kevin Caldwell < kevin.caldwell1963 at verizon.net>
> Subject: LL-L 'Funny foreign' 2007.01.18 (01) [E]
>
> Americans will make fun of names in _our own_ language, so I wouldn't
> expect foreign names to get a pass. For instance, there's the town of
> Intercourse, Pennsylvania, right in the heart of Amish country.  I
> always get a chuckle out of the name of a road I pass by whenever
> driving through southwestern Virginia: Butt Hollow Road. And there was
> a NASCAR race driver named Dick Trickle.

I think it's a bit different when the humour is within the language. It
occurs to me that people called him/her/it a thing like _that_ in full
knowledge of the English language (quite funny), or that the language
has changed in such a way that what was once innocuous no longer is
(quite fascinating).

> There are also plenty of other words that are just funny to some
> people: matriculate, masticate, spelunk...

The theory is that for English people at least, the sound of "k" is
inherently funny. It's certainly true that the word that most amused me
and my friends as children was "knickerbockers". And comedians say that
if you want to make an all-female British audience laugh, all you have
to do is use a sentence with the word "knickers" in it, while in one of
Douglas Adams's books much of the humour derives from the fact that the
word "cricket" seems funny if you take it out of context a bit.

Having said that, the all-time funniest word for me is "emergency". It's
not so much the sound of it as the idea that a slow, treacly-sounding
word describing something that happens slowly can turn into something
implying a sudden panic by adding a more or less vacuous, meaningless
suffix.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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