"short-sided" (was: Re: More surprising censorship)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 13, 2007, at 8:03 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> What, technically, is "blending"? Back in the day, a friend of ours
> was under the impression that the once well-known brand-name, "Richard
> _Hud_nut" was "Richard _Hug_nut," interpretable as "Hug_testicle_." We
> laughed with him, till we realized that he was serious, at which point
> we laughed *at* him. Did he _blend_ "Hudnut" with "hug" to get
> "Hugnut"?

"Hugnut" would be a *possible* blend (using the term as in the error
literature, for an inadvertent error in which two expressions are
combined) -- of the type david fay called "substitutions" in his 1981
paper "Substitutions and splices: A study of sentence blends".  but
it's not at all a likely one, since it's hard to imagine that the
speaker was simultaneously entertaining the word "hug" and the name
"Hudnut" at the time he first produced "Hugnut".

instead, this looks like a mis-hearing of the non-word "hud" as the
phonetically *very* similar actual word "hug", followed by a
rationalization of this perception in an analysis of the result as
involving "nut" 'testicle'.  a little mondeggcorn (tm b. zimmer).

arnold

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