groin

[Geoff Nathan]

Many many years ago, when I lived in Hawaii and was studying karate, one of my instructors, who was mostly monolectal in Hawaiian English, consistently referred to the zone in question as the 'groan'. Since there is an /oi/ phoneme in HE I was never clear whether this was an idiosyncratic pronunciation or a malapropism. Didn't know him well enough to ask.
If it was a malapropism it was a nice one, but it tended to disrupt the class, which sometimes dissolved into giggles...

Geoff

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)

----- "Alice Faber" <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU> wrote:

> From: "Alice Faber" <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Monday, May 10, 2010 10:31:59 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: groin
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: groin
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 5/10/10 10:20 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
> > In the sports section of yesterday's newspaper, an Atlanta Braves
> outfielder was said to be suffering from an injury to his "left
> groin." The phrasing immediately moved me to wonder, "How many does
> his have?" I certainly would have said the "left side of his groin."
> >
> > Evidently, however (judging from the OED attestations of the noun),
> in the 16th century and earlier one could have multiple groins . . .
> .
> >
>
> In sports-injury-speak, a groin injury is an injury to a
> lower-abdominal
> muscle or tendon, so the left or right business would refer to which
> side of the pelvis the injured muscle attaches to. (/anatomical
> handwaving)
>
> What lay observers like us would normally think of as a groin injury
> is,
> instead, referred to more descriptively as "a (nearly-)ruptured
> testicle". See
> <http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Video-Sami-Salo-reportedly-suffers-ruptured-tes?urn=nhl,239744>
> for current examples.
> --
> ==============================================================================
> Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163
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>
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