'mo = homo

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:40 PM -0800 3/12/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Mar 12, 2004, at 3:27 PM, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>>
>>>It SOUNDS like something I've heard before, but maybe I'm getting it
>>>confused
>>>with 'za = pizza, which has certainly been around for a while. Not
>>>that there
>>>is much of a semantic connection between 'mo and 'za.
>>
>>Which reminds me - I still want to know how 'za is pronounced.
>
>/za/.  derived from the spelling, presumably.
>
>stanford is famous for two-part back-clipping, giving CoHo for Coffee
>House, CoPo for Corner Pocket, FloMo for Florence Moore (a dorm),

cf. HoJo (Howard Johnson, both the food chain and the ex-Mets
baseball player), FloJo (Florence Joyner).  Which came first, I
wonder?  In particular, was HoJo a model for the Stanfordiana, given
the recurrence of the -o motif?   In any case, spelling rules in all
these cases, as with SoHo (for south of Houston St., both with [au]
nuclei), TriBeCa (Triangle below Canal St.), and other neighborhood
clipronyms in NYC and I assume elsewhere.  Of course, SoHo is based
partly on the London neighborhood name which isn't a clipronym.

larry

>MemChu for Memorial Church, etc.  the pronunciations are all based on
>the spellings of the clipped forms.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)