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<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 17 January 2007 - Volume 04<br><br>=========================================================================<br><br>From: <span id="_user_sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk" style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25);">
Sandy Fleming <<a href="mailto:sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk">sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk</a>></span><span style="font-weight: normal;" class="lg"></span><br>Subject: LL-L 'Funny foreign' 2007.01.18 (03) [E]<br><br>
<span class="q">> From: Kevin Caldwell < <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:kevin.caldwell1963@verizon.net">kevin.caldwell1963@verizon.net</a>><br>> Subject: LL-L 'Funny foreign'
2007.01.18 (01) [E]<br>><br>> Americans will make fun of names in _our own_ language, so I wouldn't<br>> expect foreign names to get a pass. For instance, there's the town of<br>> Intercourse, Pennsylvania, right in the heart of Amish country. I
<br>> always get a chuckle out of the name of a road I pass by whenever<br>> driving through southwestern Virginia: Butt Hollow Road. And there was<br>> a NASCAR race driver named Dick Trickle.<br><br></span><div style="direction: ltr;">
I think it's a bit different when the humour is within the language. It<br>occurs to me that people called him/her/it a thing like _that_ in full<br>knowledge of the English language (quite funny), or that the language
<br>has changed in such a way that what was once innocuous no longer is<br>(quite fascinating).<br></div><div style="direction: ltr;"><span class="q"><br>> There are also plenty of other words that are just funny to some
<br>> people: matriculate, masticate, spelunk...<br><br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr;">The theory is that for English people at least, the sound of "k" is<br>inherently funny. It's certainly true that the word that most amused me
<br>and my friends as children was "knickerbockers". And comedians say that<br>if you want to make an all-female British audience laugh, all you have<br>to do is use a sentence with the word "knickers" in it, while in one of
<br>Douglas Adams's books much of the humour derives from the fact that the<br>word "cricket" seems funny if you take it out of context a bit.<br><br>Having said that, the all-time funniest word for me is "emergency". It's
<br>not so much the sound of it as the idea that a slow, treacly-sounding<br>word describing something that happens slowly can turn into something<br>implying a sudden panic by adding a more or less vacuous, meaningless<br>
suffix.<br></div><div style="direction: ltr;"><span class="sg"><br>Sandy Fleming<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">http://scotstext.org/</a></span></div>
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