"illiterate"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Oct 29 15:10:33 UTC 2010


At 8:00 AM -0700 10/29/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>a friend tried to cheer me up (some health woes again) by offering
>the following on Facebook:
>
>  >This might cheer you up. I just saw it on a forum:
>  >"I'm not sure I understand. Could you illiterate?"
>
>presumably "illuminate" was the target. so it's some kind of
>malapropism, but could be either a CM (classical malapropism) or an
>FC (Fay-Cutler) type.
>

Presumably pronounced (mentally) to rhyme with "reiterate", not with
"Twitter it".

LH

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list