anise

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> (As for (non-rhotic) "Viner", there's also "Regina", which has pretty
> much been excluded from the U.S. inventory of given names by taboo
> avoidance, and when I've heard it spoken (hard to avoid when you're
> referring to the capital of Saskatchewan) it's often rendered with
> the Italian /i/ (as in Gina) rather than the English /ay/.   This
> isn't true for the heart condition of _angina_, which does however
> figure in various puns and jokes (especially when figuring in the
> collocation _acute angina_).

I was always surprised "Regina" didn't come up in the _Seinfeld_
episode "The Junior Mints", wherein Jerry is trying to remember the
name of the woman he's dating, knowing only that she was teased as a
child because her name "rhymes with a part of the female anatomy."
George suggests "Aretha", "Celeste", "Bovary", and "Mulva", before
Jerry belatedly realizes it's "Dolores".

http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheJuniorMints.htm


--Ben Zimmer

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