shahbaz

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Googits"!  Me use!

JL

"Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mark A. Mandel"
Subject: Re: shahbaz
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chris Waigl hypotheses a generalization from
- Shabazz --> *Shabbaz (Larry) **
- *"assymetry" or *"assymetric" (ibid.)
- *"parralel" (Chris himself) ***
>>>
People apparently like to select the first consonant that lends itself to
doubling.
<<<

Could be. That would also cover
- the common * (googits:
about 114,000, vs. about 1,860,000 for "disappoint", for 6% of the total)
and
- * (181,000 vs. 11,300,000, 1.6%)
- but not *
 (googits: about 91,700, plus -s ,about
10,600; -ism, about 3440; -isms, about 132; -ogram, about 1160; -ograms,
about 303).

(I'm taking that last case further and will let you know if I find anything
worth mentioning... or, I guess, for honesty's sake, even if I don't.)

I'm sure that phonology functions in here too, as people try to
apply the usually reliable English spelling rule that a lax ("short") vowel
is followed by two consonant letters, often created orthographically by
doubling a consonant letter.

** But the man was a Muslim! Maybe that's why he misspelled "Shabbas".

*** Italo Calvino, somewhere in _Cosmicomics_, has his characters doing
something like sliding down the parallel "l"s of "parallel", which creates a
useful mnemonic.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]

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