Blogifying on the Internets

Grant Barrett has an article on a little-acknowledged linguistic phenomenon: “Saying it wrong on purpose”:

People incorrectly say words on purpose all the time. My wife says aminal instead of “animal” and maters instead of “tomatoes”.

I sometimes say “muscles” so that the ‘c’ has a ‘k’ sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of “computer” (after Ned Beatty’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Mr Luthor” in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of “remember” because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

My wife and I both sometimes say chimbly instead of “chimney”, fambly instead of “family”, and liberry instead of “library”. Like maters, these are common enough pronunciations that many Americans wouldn’t notice we were saying them any differently from anyone else.

Writer and uberblogger Jason Kottke picked up on this, leading to a great ongoing discussion on his site about family-specific habits of intentional mispronouncements, including “terlet,” “pannycakes,” “sammiches” and “cham-pag-nuh.” The always-brilliant Language Log digs back into their archives and found a 1932 article from American Speech on the same topic. That leads us back another century to the 1830s intentional-misspelling initialism craze, from which we got “Oll Korrect,” or “O.K.”

There’s even a general-interest book on the topic, Paul Dickson’s “Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families,” released just last year. Dickinson’s guide is more of interest to those looking for cute things kids say than any linguistic insight, though.

It’s good to see people talking about language.

* Note that “internet” may be bastardized with only a limited subset of available suffixes and prefixes. “Intersphere,” acceptable. “Blogotubes,” not.