P.S. on Prosty

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:11 PM -0500 2/26/08, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>Prosty the Spokesgland
>Is a prostate gland, we're told
>Buried deep inside largely out of sight
>He's ignored by young and old
>
>Prosty the Spokesgland
>How we hope that lump's benign
>But it's hard to say
>Cause the only way
>To diagnose and treat is blind

It occurred to me after sending this that this is another example of
the cross-dialectal pun interference phenomenon we discussed earlier.
For me, "Prosty"--being a hypocoristic of, as well as spokesgland
for, "prostate"--would not actually rhyme with "Frosty".  The former
has an [a] in the penult, the latter an open-o (as in "frost").
(Similarly, the putative last name "Bostly" would not rhyme with
"costly".)  Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure I would have suspected when
I read that Prosty the Spokesgland had a theme song what tune it was
intended to be sung to, even had the article not mentioned it
explicitly.

LH

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