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Misunderstood Expressions

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Linda Zinn

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Feb 20, 1993, 9:02:52 AM2/20/93
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As a child (and in fact until I was approximately 30), when I
heard Buster Brown shoe commercials, I thought it was: "Hi, I'm
Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. This is my dog TIDE; he lives
in there too." It wasn't until I picked up an old children's
book about Buster Brown that I discovered the pooch's name
was Tige.

My sister, until in her teens, was quite fond of that old
hymn, "Bringing in the Sheep."

I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone else
had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply a little
hard of hearing?
--
________________________________________________________________________
* Linda Zinn When you point a finger at someone, *
* au...@cleveland.freenet.edu you're pointing three back at yourself *
* ******Wanted: Books by E.D.E.N. Southworth; cattail dinnerware****** *

Graham Toal

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Feb 20, 1993, 9:04:27 AM2/20/93
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From: au...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Linda Zinn)

My sister, until in her teens, was quite fond of that old
hymn, "Bringing in the Sheep."

I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone else
had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply a little
hard of hearing?

I heard one here last year when we last did this thread, which I haven't
been able to listen to with a straight face since: "Our Father, Harold
be thy name".

Then there's desmond "My ears are alight" dekker...

G

Francis Muir

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Feb 20, 1993, 9:28:09 AM2/20/93
to
Linda Zinn writes:

My sister, until in her teens, was quite fond of that old
hymn, "Bringing in the Sheep."

I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone
else had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply
a little hard of hearing?

Oh no, I think this is quite common -- it may have something to do with
the appalling acoustics in churches. Who shall forget

Sadly, my cross-eyed bear

and

The piece of cod that passeth all understanding

Francis Muir

The Meach

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Feb 20, 1993, 10:20:27 AM2/20/93
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In article <1m5dmc...@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> au...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Linda Zinn) writes:
>
>As a child (and in fact until I was approximately 30), when I
>heard Buster Brown shoe commercials, I thought it was: "Hi, I'm
>Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. This is my dog TIDE; he lives
>in there too." It wasn't until I picked up an old children's
>book about Buster Brown that I discovered the pooch's name
>was Tige.
>
>My sister, until in her teens, was quite fond of that old
>hymn, "Bringing in the Sheep."

Oh dear! Now you've done it!

What about that hymn about Andy Gump?
["Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me. . ."]

And my Mother swears that as a three-year-old, I refused to name
my new doll 'Gloria', because "That's the Baby Jesus' name!"
["Hark, the herald angels sing, Gloria, the new born king!"]

Or a friend of the family, who thought it was "Hark, the hair on the old
angels sing. . ."

And "Round John Virgin" has become legendary. . .

Next?

--jtm
Not really all that long ago. . .

Juliet Huang

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Feb 20, 1993, 12:50:44 PM2/20/93
to
In alt.usage.english, au...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Linda Zinn) writes:
>I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone else
>had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply a little
>hard of hearing?

In kindergarten, I used to think the line in the American "Pledge of
Allegiance":
...and to the Republic for which it stands...

really was:

...and to the Republic for Richard stands...

because I used to go to school together with a guy named Richard and
there he was standing when we were saying the Pledge!

Incidentally, there is a "hard of hearing" episode in one of the Beverly
Cleary books (she wrote several children's books with the same characters)
when the little sister Ramona misunderstands a few words in the "Star
Spangled Banner". I believe she asks, "What's a dawnzer?" for
"dawn's ear[ly light..]".

Julie

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Internet: hua...@oasys.dt.navy.mil Standard disclaimer, of course.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome
for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
---Le Petit Prince
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Dennis Baron

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Feb 20, 1993, 2:33:47 PM2/20/93
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The process is called reanalysis. There was a long and amusing discussion
of it on the Linguist List some months ago. Unfortunately, the discussion
was stopped by the list owners just as it was really getting going. I've
got my own list of favorites:

Gladly, the cross-eyed bear
Blessed art thou, a monk swimming
Lead me not into Penn Station

I'll upload some more when I get back to my DOS newsreader on Monday.
Children reanalyze all the time. It is the source of much humor and
some language change. Bob Ruly, AK is said to come from the original
French name, Bois Brulee. Anyway, I hope lots of you will list your
faves.

--
Dennis


--
Dennis Baron deb...@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana 217-333-2392

Jacob Solomon Weinstein

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Feb 20, 1993, 3:54:40 PM2/20/93
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au...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Linda Zinn) writes:
>My sister, until in her teens, was quite fond of that old
>hymn, "Bringing in the Sheep."
>
>I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone else
>had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply a little
>hard of hearing?

I was always baffled by the "Deck The Halls," because I always thought
that the line "Don we now our gay apparel" was "Dawn, we now are gay
apparel," and I could never figure out who Dawn was, or why people had
been changed into clothing.

Roger Lustig

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Feb 20, 1993, 5:52:09 PM2/20/93
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In article <C2rIC...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> ba...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron) writes:
>The process is called reanalysis. There was a long and amusing discussion
>of it on the Linguist List some months ago. Unfortunately, the discussion
>was stopped by the list owners just as it was really getting going. I've
>got my own list of favorites:

>Gladly, the cross-eyed bear
>Blessed art thou, a monk swimming
>Lead me not into Penn Station

Has anyone mentioned Round John Virgin?

Before 1954: one naked individual with liberty and justice for all.

>I'll upload some more when I get back to my DOS newsreader on Monday.
>Children reanalyze all the time. It is the source of much humor and
>some language change. Bob Ruly, AK is said to come from the original
>French name, Bois Brulee. Anyway, I hope lots of you will list your
>faves.

Beau Fleuve, NY became the place you shuffle off to on your honeymoon.

Roger

Sherwood D. Silliman

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Feb 21, 1993, 5:34:31 PM2/21/93
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My nickname has been Tige (short for Tiger) since I was little --
I remember being so excited the first time I realized that someone(thing) else
was named Tige.

And my mother told us about

"and put it to its sweet intended use"

being reanalyzed as

"sweet and tender juice."

She wondered what this sweet and tender juice really was, but
figured it must be terrifically wonderful stuff...

--
Sherwood D. Silliman "When I give food to the poor, they call me a
saint. When I ask why the poor have no food,
they call me a communist." --Dom Helder Camara

Mr A J Smaller

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Feb 22, 1993, 10:03:50 AM2/22/93
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In article <1m5f5p...@morrow.stanford.edu| fra...@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir) writes:
|Linda Zinn writes:

| I thought this might be an entertaining thread. Has anyone
| else had similar revelations, or are my sister and I simply
| a little hard of hearing?
|
|Oh no, I think this is quite common -- it may have something to do with
|the appalling acoustics in churches. Who shall forget
|
| Sadly, my cross-eyed bear

| The piece of cod that passeth all understanding

Not just in churches, but in pop music too. What about Paul Young's
famous ode to butchers everywhere:

"Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you"

And when my brother listened to Bohemian Rhapsody when he was younger,
he was greatly puzzled as to how come "Beelzebub has a devil for a
sideboard" ... (says a lot for my bro', perhaps) :-)

- Andy
--
------------- I'm flying high on something beautiful and aimless ------------
-------------- Its got a name, but I prefer to call it nameless -------------
es...@csv.warwick.ac.uk \\ Andy Smaller, Warwick University \\ Share & Enjoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dennis Baron

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Feb 22, 1993, 10:11:56 AM2/22/93
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Here's are the comments on reanalysis based on the Linguist discussion
some months ago.

Reanalysis


Reanalysis is the process whereby we make the unfamiliar in
language familiar. It is common. Sometimes it results in
errors. Sometimes in new words. And it can be
unintentionally funny.
Here's what I mean. Children try to realign the
world's mysteries so they seem more familiar. When told to
behave, they regularly protest, "But I am being have." We
accuse them of doing something "on purpose." They respond
with the defense that they did it "on accident." You tell
them, "Nobody gets to have dessert." They say, "Yesbody
gets to have dessert." This is reanalysis.
My daughter was spelling Mississippi aloud, practicing
for a test. My three-year-old son, always keen to protect
men's rights against the assaults of his nine-year-old
sister, interrupted, yelling "I want Mr. Sipi, Mr. Sipi, Mr.
Sipi."
My daughter reanalyzes too. Her girl scout troop
closes each meeting with a little song which ends with the
words, "God is nigh." Nigh means `near.' It's an
old-fashioned kind of word, and these girl scouts are
definitely modern kids. So they end their song with a
phrase that means much more to them, "God," they sing, "is
nice."
Both of our kids, when they were little, responded to
the question, "Do you want me to carry you?" with the
command, "Carry you, carry you," treating you not as a
pronoun but as part of the verb carry.
I am forgetful, and when I forgot something important
one day my daughter said, "Daddy, you have Oldtimer's
disease."
And children may ultimately be responsible for the
religious apocrypha: Lead us not into Penn Station; Surely
Good Mrs. Murphy will follow me all the days of my life.
Blessed art thou, a monk swimming. And an ursine critter
with poor ocular control substitutes in the hymn as Gladly,
the cross-eyed bear.
But adults do this stuff too. There was an ad in a
shop window for "An ultra-violent lamp." A mine of
information frequently becomes a mind of information.
Asparagus is often reanalyzed in English folk dialects to
sparrow grass.
Renalysis gives us the common expression "to wind one's
way," from the original "wend one's way." Wend is an
old-fashioned form of the verb wendan, `to go' (we still use
the past form, went, without confusion), and the saying
originally referred to going on one's way. But wend became
extinct, and I suppose the association of winding roads made
the shift inevitable.
Sometimes we see a word in print and for one reason or
another we apply an alternate but perfectly reasonable set
of pronunciation rules to give us something quite new: lots
of people look at m-i-s-l-e-d and read it as `mizzled'
instead of misled. One linguist reports that every time he
reads the word barroom he can't help rhyming it with varoom.
The same linguist sees spoonfed as one-syllable, which he
pronounces spoonf'd, as if it were the past tense of the
verb to spoonf.
Sometimes reanalysis involves translation from one
language to another. There's a town in Arkansas that was
originally settled by the French and called Bois BrulF,
which means `burnt woods.' But when English speakers took
over, the place became Bob Ruly, and lots of folks today
think of it as a town founded by a guy whose first name was
Bob and whose last name was Ruly. The name of the animal
known as the woodchuck has nothing to do with wood or
chucks, but is most likely an Englishing of the original
Algonquian name of the animal, which does after all like to
live in the woods.
Finally, when I was in college, one of the English
profs spent a couple of weeks lecturing on the writers of
the fin de si劃le, French for `the end of the century.' His
accent was none too good, and two weeks later he got a batch
of student papers arguing with perception and thoughtful
analysis and many good examples, on the "fantasy echo" in
late 19th century American literature.
Like all good students, we had learned that if the
teacher says something you don't understand, it must be very
important, and you just have to do whatever you can to make
it make sense.

---
and that's just for starters

Dennis

deb...@uiuc.edu (\ 217-333-2392
\'\ fax: 217-333-4321
Dennis Baron \'\ __________
Department of English / '| ()_________)
Univ. of Illinois \ '/ \ ~~~~~~~~ \
608 S. Wright St. \ \ ~~~~~~ \
Urbana IL 61801 ==). \__________\
(__) ()__________)

Chris Cannam

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Feb 22, 1993, 11:42:02 AM2/22/93
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In article <baron.132...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
ba...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron) writes:

When told to
behave, they regularly protest, "But I am being have."


I was about to follow up and ask how on earth you pronounced `behave',
if it was to sound like `be have'; then I decided I was probably just
getting the wrong idea.

Incidentally, `misled' is one that my mother never tires of retelling,
from an embarrassing incident in sixth form.

--

Le monde mental ment monumentalement.

Pisiyem Siaiyay

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Feb 22, 1993, 11:45:27 PM2/22/93
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> es...@csv.warwick.ac.uk (Mr A J Smaller) writes:

>And when my brother listened to Bohemian Rhapsody when he was younger,
>he was greatly puzzled as to how come "Beelzebub has a devil for a
>sideboard" ...

Or this one from "Whole Lotta Love":

You need Kool-Aid...

-Dave

Michael Ardai

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Feb 23, 1993, 10:47:22 AM2/23/93
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The other day I was looking at the VMS command

submit/nolog/noprint/notify foo.com

and caught myself wondering what the /tify switch did, and why we didn't
want to tify this batch job...
/mike
--
\|/ Michael L. Ardai N1IST Teradyne ATG Boston
--- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
/|\ ar...@maven.dnet.teradyne.com

Todd Andrew Simpson

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Feb 23, 1993, 11:52:37 AM2/23/93
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In article <C2vx7...@vcd.hp.com> dmu...@vcd.hp.com (Pisiyem Siaiyay) writes...

You need Kool-Aid...

Or "Takin' Care of Business":

Get a sickening guitar, chances are you'll go far...

Or "Shattered":

Don't you know the prime rate's goin' up, up, up, up, UP!
(Hey, it was at the time...)

Or "Stairway to Heaven":

If there's a bustle in your hedgehog, don't be a lawman
It's just a sprinkling from the Bake Queen

For all I know, I'm the only one who made any of these mistakes. But
I know I'm not the only one who thought Jimi Hendrix said "'Scuse me
while I kiss this guy" (actually "the sky") in "Purple Haze".

- T.A.S.

Linda Zinn

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Feb 23, 1993, 4:30:57 PM2/23/93
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In a previous article, ar...@wizard.atb.teradyne.com (Michael Ardai) says:

>The other day I was looking at the VMS command
>
>submit/nolog/noprint/notify foo.com
>
>and caught myself wondering what the /tify switch did, and why we didn't
>want to tify this batch job...
>/mike

I once had to read the word "miniseries" about six times before I
realized what it was. I kept thinking it was a new term for slight
miseries or something, pronounced mi-NIZ-eries.

Mark Israel

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Feb 23, 1993, 8:40:10 PM2/23/93
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In article <baron.132...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, ba...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron) writes:

> Children try to realign the world's mysteries so they seem

> more familiar. [...] We accuse them of doing something

> "on purpose." They respond with the defense that they did it

> "on accident." [...] This is reanalysis.

I disagree.

English *idiom* happens to require "by accident". But there's
no *logical* reason why it shouldn't be "on accident". The
child's analysis of "on purpose" is correct and is not a
reanalysis.

> You tell them, "Nobody gets to have dessert." They say,
> "Yesbody gets to have dessert."

The child has correctly identified the "no" morpheme in the
word "nobody". He may not have grasped the entire meaning, but
again, there's no *logical* reason why the word "somebody" (or
"everybody") should not have been "yesbody".

mis...@csi.uottawa.ca Mark Israel
Expressions of exasperation are not arguments.

Mary Shafer

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Feb 24, 1993, 12:04:00 AM2/24/93
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The Doors:

"Found an Iliff in your arms,
Poetry in your heart.
Break on through to the other side....

(Iliff is my husband's surname, pronounced EYE-liff.)
--
Mary Shafer DoD #0362 KotFR sha...@ursa-major.spdcc.com

Lorne Epp

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Feb 24, 1993, 12:41:27 AM2/24/93
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Or the Bob Welch song "Central Limit Thereom". I think it's supposed to
be "Sentimental Woman", but it appeared on the radio around midterm time,
so it's always sounded like "Central Limit Theorem" to me.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lorne Epp e...@mala.bc.ca

Lorne Epp

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Feb 24, 1993, 12:43:47 AM2/24/93
to
In article <1me52h...@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>, au...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Linda Zinn) writes:
>
> In a previous article, ar...@wizard.atb.teradyne.com (Michael Ardai) says:
>
>>The other day I was looking at the VMS command
>>
>>submit/nolog/noprint/notify foo.com
>>
>>and caught myself wondering what the /tify switch did, and why we didn't
>>want to tify this batch job...
>>/mike
>
> I once had to read the word "miniseries" about six times before I
> realized what it was. I kept thinking it was a new term for slight
> miseries or something, pronounced mi-NIZ-eries.

And "biopic" is some kind of eyesight problem.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lorne Epp e...@mala.bc.ca

Peter Moylan

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Feb 25, 1993, 11:36:28 PM2/25/93
to

> I once had to read the word "miniseries" about six times before I
> realized what it was. I kept thinking it was a new term for slight
> miseries or something, pronounced mi-NIZ-eries.

Ah, we do learn something by reading this newsgroup. I, too, had
been wondering what a minisery was. Thank you for clearing it up.

I wonder how many other people this will misle.

--
Peter Moylan ee...@wombat.newcastle.edu.au

Peter Moylan

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Feb 25, 1993, 11:52:04 PM2/25/93
to
I once read of someone - I think it was in an Aldous Huxley novel -
who confused "deshabille" and "dish of veal". This had me puzzled
for quite a long time, because I couldn't see any connection at all.
For some reason my mind wouldn't let me see the "s" and "h"
combining to form a "sh" sound.

I pronounce this word the French way (day za bee yay), and I had always
understood that that was the standard pronunciation in English too.
But the character in the novel was, I think, supposed to be a
well-educated Englishman. Is there anywhere in England (or elsewhere)
where the "dish o' veal" pronunciation is considered normal?

Peter

sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own

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Feb 26, 1993, 1:35:11 PM2/26/93
to

ba...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron) wrote about:
>
> Reanalysis
>
> . . . when I was in college, one of the English

> profs spent a couple of weeks lecturing on the writers of
> the fin de siecle, French for `the end of the century.'

You made me remember my Educational Psychology class with that one. I
hadn't read the chapter for the day's lecture, so when the prof started
talking about that famous French developmental psychologist, all I could
write in my notes was

PIJ ( ?? )

After all, I had a friend whose real name was H. L. Cain; why couldn't
this psychologist go by letters? That night, I went through my notes &
changed all the instances to 'PIJ' into 'Piaget'.
__
\/ -+- randy -+- all generalizations are flawed -+- fu...@llnl.gov

Ralph Marrone

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Feb 26, 1993, 1:55:45 PM2/26/93
to
In article <930220140...@pizzabox.demon.co.uk> Graham Toal <gt...@gtoal.com> writes:
>I heard one here last year when we last did this thread, which I haven't
>been able to listen to with a straight face since: "Our Father, Harold
>be thy name".
>
>Then there's desmond "My ears are alight" dekker...
>
>G


Remember The Beatles' song _Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds? Well,
my younger sister thought that the line "The girl with kaleidoscope
eyes", was "The girl with colitis goes by."


Regards,


Ralph Marrone

Evan Kirshenbaum

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Feb 26, 1993, 2:41:58 PM2/26/93
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In article <1993Feb26...@wombat.newcastle.edu.au> ee...@wombat.newcastle.edu.au (Peter Moylan) writes:
>I pronounce this word the French way (day za bee yay), and I had always
>understood that that was the standard pronunciation in English too.
>But the character in the novel was, I think, supposed to be a
>well-educated Englishman. Is there anywhere in England (or elsewhere)
>where the "dish o' veal" pronunciation is considered normal?

I've always pronounced it /,dIs h& 'bil/. M/W NCD gives
/,dEs @ 'bi(@)l/, /,dEs @ 'bIl/, and /,dEs @ 'bi/. None of these are
quite the French pronunciation, but I don't think I've ever heard the
"sh" pronounced /S/.

Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories | Now and then an innocent man is sent
3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U | to the legislature.
Palo Alto, CA 94304 | Kim Hubbard
|
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |
(415)857-7572


Cole Kendall

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Feb 26, 1993, 5:48:04 PM2/26/93
to
In article <C2wuv...@cs.psu.edu>, p...@math.psu.edu (Todd Andrew Simpson) says:
>
[deletia]

>
>Or "Shattered":
>
> Don't you know the prime rate's goin' up, up, up, up, UP!

Oddly, you got this part right but omitted the forecast in the next
sentence:

To eleven this time!

which was just about right. Many forget that Jagger attended LSE.

Cole Kendall

Dennis Brennan

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Feb 28, 1993, 6:29:11 PM2/28/93
to
There's an amusing urban legend about a mother who named her newborn
son after a sign in the delivery room:

"Nosmo King"

--
Dennis Brennan
dj...@midway.uchicago.edu

Dennis Brennan

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Feb 28, 1993, 6:33:57 PM2/28/93
to
>Not just in churches, but in pop music too. What about Paul Young's
>famous ode to butchers everywhere:
>
>"Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you"
>
>And when my brother listened to Bohemian Rhapsody when he was younger,
>he was greatly puzzled as to how come "Beelzebub has a devil for a
>sideboard" ... (says a lot for my bro', perhaps) :-)

Not to mention the song "Caribbean Queen", which I had always interpreted
as "Caribou Twist."

Then there's the Dire Straits' "Money for nothing and your checks for free."

I think that the song "Out of my dreams and into my car" actually came
from a similar mistake in an old Beatles song when Ringo meant to
conclude the line "...heart".

--
Dennis Brennan
dj...@midway.uchicago.edu

Mary Shafer

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Mar 1, 1993, 11:27:27 PM3/1/93
to
I thought for ages that it was "Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds" after
the song first hit the airwaves. It wasn't until I finally managed to
get a copy of the album (Beatles' albums sold out quickly when they
were first released) that I discovered what it really was.

Andrew Merritt

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Mar 4, 1993, 9:44:37 AM3/4/93
to
There is the Billy Ocean (?) song, "When the Going Gets Tough", the chorus
of which sounds like "Go and Get Stuffed" (*), even when you know what it is
supposed to be.

(*) I don't know what this would mean to an American; over here (UK) it is an
impolite way of telling someone to go away.

Andrew

Raphael Mankin

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Mar 4, 1993, 4:29:27 PM3/4/93
to
In article <1m5f5p...@morrow.stanford.edu> fra...@oas.stanford.edu writes:

>...


>
> The piece of cod that passeth all understanding
>

Or the old chestnut
Yacc: the piece of code that understandeth all parsing

'Verse and Worse' by Arnold Silcock (Faber 1960 onwards) has a host of these.

--------------
Raphael Mankin Nil taurus excretum

Raphael Mankin

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Mar 4, 1993, 4:35:48 PM3/4/93
to
I liked the notice about an event to which only 'bonified members' would
be admitted.

Simon Read

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Mar 5, 1993, 7:02:58 AM3/5/93
to

I pronounce this word the French way (day za bee yay), and I had always
understood that that was the standard pronunciation in English too.
But the character in the novel was, I think, supposed to be a
well-educated Englishman. Is there anywhere in England (or elsewhere)
where the "dish o' veal" pronunciation is considered normal?

There is nowhere that I know of in this small collection of islands
where anyone (who was "well educated") would think that pronunciation
normal. On the other hand there are always who don't know better (who
probably wouldn't know the word) or who pronounce differently for
affectation :-)

Simon Read
----------
Simon...@umist.ac.uk

A Potts

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Mar 5, 1993, 8:17:36 AM3/5/93
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One that always tripped me up was the term 'biopic' which should be
'bio-pic' ie a film about someone's life, but I always thought was
something to do with eyesight.('BI-opic')

OK this was pretty dim I guess, but another misunderstood expression
springs to mind. For a year and a half I worked as a historical
researcher, and a number of the documents I read began with the word
'SHEWETH' in big letters. I consulted every dictionary I could find to
ascertain the meaning of this strange word, which was used to the
beginning of this century quite frequently, but to no use. In my mind I was
'pronouncing' it shee'weth which was where I was going wrong...

Only last month did it occur to me that it is, of course, the indicative
of the verb 'show' (in the Shavian and old manner 'shew'). SHOW'eth.
Simple now, but it wound me up for months.

AJP

Peter Moylan

unread,
Mar 7, 1993, 8:15:41 PM3/7/93
to
In article <-2783...@hpopd.pwd.hp.com>, a...@hpopd.pwd.hp.com (Andrew Merritt) writes:
> There is the Billy Ocean (?) song, "When the Going Gets Tough", the chorus
> of which sounds like "Go and Get Stuffed" (*), even when you know what it is
> supposed to be.

Probably deliberate. It's like that line that was always written as
"Judy in disguise with glasses", but which the singers always
pronounced as "Judy in the skies with acid".

--
Peter Moylan ee...@wombat.newcastle.edu.au

Jane Philcox

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Mar 9, 1993, 12:11:32 AM3/9/93
to
In article <1nb8ek...@shelley.u.washington.edu> demc...@hardy.u.washington.edu (Debbie McGhee) writes:
>a...@hpopd.pwd.hp.com (Andrew Merritt) writes:
>
>>Go and Get Stuffed" (

>
>>(*) I don't know what this would mean to an American; over here (UK) it is an
>>impolite way of telling someone to go away.
>
>Interesting. I knew the meaning of 'get stuffed' without reading your
>explanation. I have heard the expression before. I am now puzzling over
>where it was that I was first introduced to it, if it is indeed true that
>the phrase is not used in U.S. brands of English.

In Australia "get stuffed" is a more polite way of saying "get fucked." There
was a time when, if it was said to a man, it implied anal sex, and was
therefore very insulting. (Yes, Virginia, I am old enough to remember when
implying that a man was a homosexual was mortally offensive.) These days it
merely means "have sex", and has lost some of its offensive overtones,
although its usage could hardly be called polite. To tell someone to "Go and
get stuffed" is not usually used to mean go away, I think (correct me if I'm
wrong, Peter), but is more emphasis added to the basic phrase. "Fuck off!"
however does most definitely mean "Go away," with all the emphasis the speaker
can dream up. I have occasionally heard "Stuff off!" but I have a gut feeling
that it's a rather affected usage - the sort of thing that a man who would
usually say "Fuck off" might use in front of "ladies," or that a woman who
"doesn't use four-letter words" might use. "Piss off" is more common than
either of the others.

Did you want to know anything else? I can rave for hours on things like this!

Regards, Jane.
--
*******************************************************************************
ABSURDITY: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion
*******************************************************************************

Detlef Lannert

unread,
Mar 12, 1993, 2:31:19 AM3/12/93
to
In article <731280...@panache.demon.co.uk> ra...@panache.demon.co.uk (Raphael Mankin) writes:

>In article <1m5f5p...@morrow.stanford.edu> fra...@oas.stanford.edu writes:
>
>>...
>>
>> The piece of cod that passeth all understanding
>>
>Or the old chestnut
> Yacc: the piece of code that understandeth all parsing

A profound knowledge of Latin doesn't always help to avoid
misunderstandings of classical texts. In a Latin mass there is the line,
Vere dignum et iustum est aequum et salutare ...
("It's truly graceful and right, adequate and beneficial ...")

There was the retired cavalrist who always understood it as
Vere dignum et iustum est equum et salutare.
Which about means, "In spring it's graceful and right to also greet a
horse." (Note the split infinitive!)
--
Detlef Lannert DC3EK E-Mail: ts...@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen: Redet man zu ihnen, so
uebersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz
etwas anderes. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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