Mispronunciation

[Charles Doyle]

As far as I know, there isn't actaully a journal called _The Annals of Proctology_; otherwise I would have submitted my article THERE.  (I just googled the phrase "annals of proctology" and got 7 hits; one was my article, and the others entailed lesser wits' joking with the phrase.)

As I explained in the aforementioned article, the rat episode in _1984_ represents an "upward displacement" (in psychobabblese) of the famous case of Sigmoid Freud's "Rat Man."

--Charlie
________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:52:38 -0800
>From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
>Subject: Re: Mispronunciation
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>You mean the article in _The Annals of Proctology_?
>
>  Now - as the proctologist said to the patient - brace yourself !  The one known person who read your gerbil disquisition is me !  And I remember it because the rodential phenomenon referred to was being much discussed among my colleagues after a reference to it, I think, in the campus paper.
>
>  The World Wildlife Fund has been working to discourage such doings. If such doing are really done.
>
>  The story could have developed from a drug-hazy recollection of the final scene of _Nineteen Eighty-Four_.
>
>  JL
>
>Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
>
>
>Some years ago, I footnoted a dry and learned discussion about the folklore of gerbil insertion with the smart-ass comment that I had examined "the annals of proctology" but failed to discover actual instances of the urban legend motif. As far as I'm aware, nobody ever noticed the joke--or found it amusing--or even read the article!
>
>--Charlie

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org