Modern Proverb: Life is just one damn thing after another (slight antedating 1909 July 20)

Charles Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Sun Mar 21 20:46:27 UTC 2010


Does anyone know (or have a good guess) about how "ODTAA" might be pronounced? Initialism or acronym? It's commonly called an acronym, but most things are. Masefield in some of his letters does seem to have spelled the title of his novel "Odtaa" (the book itself shows the word in all caps--but then, that's common on title-pages and spines). How about currently? It's a little hard to imagine how the word might be pronounced acronymically.

--Charlie


---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:56:28 -0400
>From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> (on behalf of Alison Murie <sagehen7470 at ATT.NET>)

>~~~~~~~~~~~
>John Masefield wrote a book called ODTAA,  and a recent, though late,
>popular detective story writer (can't think of his name, worked as a
>chef in France but wrote in English) had a book in which the central
>couple found the expression "Odtaa" a useful adjective, as in "That's
>very odtaa."  It was left to the reader to figure out what was meant
>by the word.
>AM

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