Subject: re: Getting Snickered

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yes, Larry, and what's more, the "snickerer" (also the "snookerer" in such cases) himself, or onlooking snickerers, is bound to be snickering at the "snickeree," which is a hyponym for "snookeree."

It would be even worse if the "snookeree"/ "snickeree" happened to be snacking (as "snacker") on a "Snickers" at the moment he or she was snookered by the snickering snickerer's "snicker."

If a "Snickers" were to be snickered in a _faux_ snickering, the snookered snickeree would have been snickered/ snookered by the snickering snickerer's Snickers.

Altogether a highly unpleasant concept.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Subject: re: Getting Snickered
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At 11:15 AM -0400 7/5/05, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>L,
>
>This is not my sense of "snookered" (principally "cheated" or "done
>in by deceit," synonymous with "sneetered"). Partridge has it from
>1914, presumably from "snooks," an imaginary game devised by a
>practical joker, cited by Farmer and Henley from around 1800.
>Apparently unrelated to "cock a snook," the derisive gesture of
>thumbing the nose; this sense of "snook" is not attested until the
>end of the 19th C. I can't find my synonymous "sneeter" since neither
>DARE nor HDAS go that far.
>
>In short, I'm with the chocolate=feces interpretation of the Gitmo term.
>
Oh, I'm not challenging that. It's the phonology and morphology of
"getting snookered" combined with the referential semantics of
"Snickers" that I had in mind for this. My only question was whether
this was an intentional blending of the two, an eggcorn, or something
in between. Part of what I assumed was going on is that the gitmo
internees in question may well have lured the guard in question (the
snickeree) into an appropriate snickering position, which is where
the snookering would have come in. (I've actually seen this done by
the gorillas at the San Diego Zoo, so it wouldn't be surprising if
the internees would have come up with a similar idea.) If this had
been "X snickered me" rather than "I got snickered by X", this
analysis would not have arisen.

L


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