Undergraduate front-clipping (was 'mo=homo)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>Good heavens! I found it on-line:
>http://www.corneli.us/CarletonClassof69/memorabilia/loosely.pdf
>Beware.  It takes up 4MB.
>
>At 3/6/2004 12:20 AM -0600, Tom Kysilko wrote:
>>  These and many other terms were collected in a lexicon that was distributed
>>to freshmen (in 1966 anyway).  Entitled "Loosely Speaking", it ran to at
>>least 20 mimeographed pages.

That's very interesting! Probably half of those items were current at
Michigan when I was there (about the same time), and a few I haven't heard
since then.

Surely I don't remember ever hearing any of those odd apheretic ones except
for "za".

"Ner" = "dinner"? "Nis" = "tennis"? "Dry" = "laundry"? "Fee" = "coffee"?
"Gly" = "ugly"? "Ries" = "memories" [really hard to believe]?

How would one pronounce "bage" (meaning "cribbage"), please? "Baidge" or
"bidge" or "budge" or "badge"?

Apparently the unfamiliarity of most of these ones is not restricted to my
admittedly ignorant self. Were they local? Ephemeral? Is "za" (along with
"rents" maybe) an isolated survivor of a whole once-thriving phylum? Or
were most of these modeled on "za", perhaps? These seem so unnatural to me
that I suppose that their invention was a sort of conscious word-game like
Pig Latin or backslang ... but how widespread was the game? And how
long-lasting? I have to admit that "[chrysanthe]mum" is pretty weird too,
now that I think about it: still I can invoke (at least imagine!) a variant
pronunciation with clear last-syllable secondary stress, while I can't make
such an excuse for "ten[nis]".

BTW: "mung" (= "crud") is the ancestor of the modern computer-jargon
"mung", I'm sure: this I've heard continuously since the 1960's. "Mung-pie"
(based on "Moon Pie"?) I don't recall, though.

-- Doug Wilson