whipping words

[Jonathan Lighter]

We haven't had a SOTA in while, but this seems to qualify on *so* many
levels.

JL

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      whipping words
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  From a current TV commercial for, it appears, "Wonderful Pistachios":
>
> A woman dressed in a dominatrix outfit with a pistachio-green bustier
> (if that's the right word) holds a coiled whip in her hand and places
> a nut on the seat of a straight-back chair. She then stands back at
> arm's length from the chair and nut, presumably a pistachio.
> Voice-over:
>
> "Dominatrix do it..."
>
> [she unleashes the whip, which neatly cracks the nut in half with a loud
> snap]
>
> "...on command.  Wonderful Pistachios.  Get Cracking."
>
> The interest is, of course, not just another run-of-the-mill
> S&M-infused nut commercial but the reanalysis of "dominatrix" as a
> plural. Of what, one wonders--"dominatrick"?  And don't dominatrixes,
> or dominatrices, standardly make *others* do things on command rather
> than doing things on command themselves?  Clearly, mangling the
> morphology is just the first step on that slippery slope...
>
> LH
>
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