kneck and kneck

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Sep 3 00:15:00 UTC 2007


At 7:59 PM -0400 9/2/07, Laurence Horn wrote:
>I hadn't, but note 660 ghits for "pain in the kneck" and 120 for
>"sore kneck", so I don't think it's restricted to a few frozen
>phrases.  In other words, I'd go with (c), and bring in (OK, Jerry,
>as a blend if you like) influence or "contamination" from _knee_, the
>general idea being that there's a counterintuitive spelling of
>body-parts that begin with /n/.  There are even 18 ghits for "broken
>knose", although curiously none at all for "stuffed knose", maybe
>because it does somehow look like a deli item.
>
P.S.  cf. also "knavel gazing"

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