word finding

[Wilson Gray]

Apparently, neither you nor Tyler wastes much time watching prime-time
"comedy," arnold. ;-) It's become a cliché that the tall, broad-shouldered,
stunningly-handsome, blind date will turn out to be a gay guy who thinks
that he has a date with another guy, whose name is "Sam," and not with some
chick protagonist named "Samantha" who's merely nicknamed "Sam." BTW, have
you ever seen pictures of John Rechy when he was in the prime of life? From
the chin down, he nearly out-Aahnolded Aahnold in the latter's Mr. Universe
days, though Rechy's day job was professor of English at USC.

--Wilson

On 4/11/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: word finding
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Apr 9, 2006, at 11:02 AM, sagehen wrote:
>
> >  arnold writes..........
> >>
> >> 3.  and then an odd (to me) word choice, from MTV's Real World gay
> >> guy Tyler, interviewed in Instinct magazine, April 2006, p. 21: "I
> >> was the most athletic person in the house, which is kind of a
> >> dichotomy to have the most athetic guy being the gay guy."
> >  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > Maybe he was thinking "anomaly,"  if he supposes it to be odd for a
> > gay to
> > be athletic.
>
> ah, "anomaly" is a good suggestion.  odd word choices tend to make my
> mind turn to jelly, so that i can't think of what *i* might say in
> these circumstances.
>
> "anomaly" isn't as phonologically similar to "dichotomy" as most
> classical malapropisms are to their (missed) targets, but
> prosodically they're a perfect match, and they have the same stressed
> vowel and final segment, so that's not so bad.  and of course they're
> both serious academic-sounding words.
>
> but i doubt that Tyler himself supposes it's odd for a gay guy to be
> athletic.  almost surely, though, he believes -- as do i -- that a
> lot of other people think so.
>
> arnold
>
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