Y'all gnome sane?

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Dan may have meant to raise the possibility that the error was caused
by a faulty transcription created by a voice recognition application
such as Siri or Google Now instead of a finger manipulation error.

Compressed elliptical utterances are difficult to decode for men and machines.


On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 2:27 AM, hw gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       hw gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Y'all gnome sane?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:15 AM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> digitalis?
>>
>
> Why wouldn't it be? Latin _lapsus digitalis_ = English "finger-slip"
>
> I take it that a person who speaks a dialect in which "saying" is
> pronounced "sane" should slip up and actually *write* "saying" as "sane" is
> less interesting than challenging the waning competence of the winner of
> the 1954 high-school winner of the Latin Contest of the Missouri Province
> of the Society of Jesus? :-)
>
> FWIW, "Gnome sane?" as a jocular spelling of the ubiquitous
> conversation-filler, "Know what I'm saying?" has been around for at least a
> dekkid.
> --
> -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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