joke, apocrypha, or eggcorn?

[Jonathan Lighter]

>> I got this...from an e-mail joke subscription list...


Larry!  Not you!!!!!

JL
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      joke, apocrypha, or eggcorn?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> So I got this charming story from an e-mail joke subscription list,
> which I thought smelled a bit apocryphal:
>
> Brenda's six-year-old daughter was explaining to the other
> kids what "extinct" meant:
>
> "Well," she said in all seriousness, "it means that the
> dinosaurs are all dead and have been dead so long they don't
> stink anymore. That's why they call them exstinked."
>
> But just in case, I searched on "exstinked", and found 3640 raw hits,
> although Google does helpfully ask if I meant "extinct".  Judging
> from the pages I checked, all involving not only dinosaurs but dodo
> birds, Tasmanian tigers, and other critters going "exstinked" and
> debating the reasons for it (often on WikiAnswers) or arguing about
> whether it would be OK to bring back critters that have become
> "exstinked", it seems to be a common enough naive reanalysis.
> Obviously, "extinct" is opaque--but is "exstinked" as transparent to
> those who spell it that way as it was to the six-year-old girl above?
> Do some, many, or most such spellers really suppose an olfactory
> basis for the etymology?  Inquiring minds want to know!
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"There You Go Again...Using Reason on the Planet of the Duck-Billed
Platypus"

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