groin

[Wilson Gray]

They've heard Forrest Gump say,

"In the buh-_tahks_, sir"

instead of reading police reports, which usually read something like,

"took a bullet into the left buttock."

I.e., perhaps, were they accustomed to seeing the word in print,
they'd have realized that Gump's was supposed to be taken as a
*mis*pronuntiationn underlining what a hick he was. After all, who
says "buh--lahks" for "bullocks" or "bah-lahks" for "ballocks."

Sadly, I've even heard people refer to, e.g. "my left buh-tocks cheek."

What can you do?

-Wilson

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: groin
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *"He hurt his left head"?  Surely not, Ron!
>
> ". . . left butt" might be a little different, since "butt" seems sort of like an abbreviation or synonym for "buttock" (which our students now, for some reason, all pronounce [b at tak] instead of [b at d@k]).
>
> --Charlie
>
>
>
> ---- Original message ----
>>Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 17:41:41 +0000
>>From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> (on behalf of ronbutters at AOL.COM)>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>I didn't understand the problem at first because it seemed perfectly natural to me to interpret this as meaning 'left side of his groin'.  I'm not sure why this is so easy for me, but  "left head" and "left butt" elicit the same (Gricean?) response.
>
>>Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>>Date:         Mon, 10 May 2010 12:07:41
>>To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] groin
>>
>>An inveterate jock and sports fan myself, I would never refer to a ruptured testicle as a "groin injury." (I wouldn't even dare think about one of those!) A groin injury is a pulled muscle in the area of a man's (or, I suppose, a woman's) sole groin.  The question was whether it's idiomatic to speak of a person's having TWO groins (left and right).
>>
>>--Charlie
>>
>>
>>
>>---- Original message ----
>>>Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 10:31:59 -0400
>>>From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> (on behalf of Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>)>
>>>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
>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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