wasteses

[Mark Mandel]

Or, non-jocularly, "drownded".

m a m

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

> A correspondent writes:
>
> > The other night I was watching an old episode of Project Runway, and one
> of
> > the contestants said, "It wasteses time."  It sounded like she took
> "wastes"
> > and conjugated it again, for "wasteses."
> >
> > Although it caught my attention, it also sounded familiar.  Is this a
> > (somewhat) common thing for people to do in speech?  In my head it sounds
> > girly, but that could be like the thing where people think only sorority
> > girls using rising intonation or whatever.
>
> I had assumed the pronunciation here was [weIst at s@z], along the lines
> of the jocular double-plural "breasteses", but said correspondent
> heard it as [weIsts at z]. Has anyone come across this type of doubled
> inflection (outside of Gollum-speak)?
>
> Thread from last February about the double plurals "buttockses",
> "breasteses", "pantses", and Gollum's "pocketses":
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0802b&L=ads-l&D=0#17
>
> I can't recall hearing the /-s/ inflection being doubled on a verb,
> but /-(@)d/ often gets doubled or tripled for fun, as in, "I'm
> screwededed" [skrud at d@d].
>

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