"saditty" (snobbish) from "Saturday"?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 12:51 AM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
> > ... It's not at all
> > impossible that someone, as a joke, decided to use the pronunciation,
> > [s@ deTI] or some such, for "sedate" and it took off from there.
>
> I agree it's a real possibility. In fact a reasonable default
> hypothesis. [I think it's more plausible than the "Saturday" derivation
> (but that don't make it true).] I think various humorous malformations
> of slightly-sophisticated words were fashionable a few decades ago.
> Probably some of the savants know more than I. My father had dozens of
> these (most of which I can't remember offhand): one example which comes
> to mind is "coinkydink" for "coincidence", which gets thousands of
> Google hits.

Grant Barrett covered "coinkydink" in his Malaysia Star column on
intentional mispronunciations:

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/comments/saying_it_wrong_on_purpose/

And Larry Horn provided a summary of Margaret Reed's 1932 article
"Intentional Mispronunciations" (AmSp 7:192-99):

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0801C&L=ads-l&P=20462


--Ben Zimmer

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