facacta

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:48 PM -0500 11/18/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>from Rolling Stone, Nov. 26, 2009, p. 49:
>
>===
>Springsteen insisted that he and Billy Joel sing "New York State of Mind."
>"He loves singing that song," says Joel. "He always fucks up the phrasing,
>but it's Bruce's way of doing it, and in some _facacta_ [italicized] way, it
>actually works."
>===
>
>Yitalian. Who knew?

Mebbe a loanword from Ladino = 'overdone, overcooked' < _fare_ + _cocta_
Reminds me of a suggestion in a linguistics paper awhile back that in
interpreting multiple negation, we need to admit alongside "Duplex
negatio affirmat" the supplementary principles "Triplex negatio
confundit" and "Quadruplex negatio fer'blondiat", as illustrated by
e.g.

"No one denies that a baby with a neural tube defect isn't a
catastrophe, but..."
"Bernie produced what Bernie is supposed to produce, but I don't
think, either, that you can single out Bernie as not a guy who is not
part of the disappointment."

--where "fer'blondiat" is identified as a somewhat obscure verb
borrowed into late Latin standardly pronounced "farblondzhet".   (CLS
27, 1991, p. 104)

But "facacta" is more likely to have been seriously intended...

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org