fooferall

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 1:19 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wilson, you're absolutely right. My (fairly minor) point was this was not a
> spelling found among nearly two dozen alternates in the OED. Nor did AZ or
> MQ mention it in their respective posts (AZ Blog and WWWords). Nothing more.

The OED does have "foofaral" as one of the spellings (with a cite from
1981), so this alternation (hypercorrection based on l-vocalization or
what have you) hasn't gone unnoticed.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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