LINGUIST List 3.714

Mon 21 Sep 1992

Disc: Reanalyses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Re: 3.701 Reanalyses
2. , 3.703 Reanalyses
3. CHRISTINE KAMPRATH, RE: 3.703 Reanalyses
4. , Reanalyses
5. Herb Stahlke, Reanalyses
6. "Ellen F. Prince", Re: 3.703 Reanalyses
7. , Re: 3.703 Reanalyses
8. Nancy L. Dray, Re: 3.677 Reanalyses

Message 1: Re: 3.701 Reanalyses

Well, if popular reanalyses from classified ads count, here are
two of my favorites -- I've seen both of them more than once, and
in different papers; in fact, classified ads might be a rich source __

For sale: four Chip 'n' Dale chairs ...

For sale: black rot iron table ...

Carol Georgopoulos

 A print-level reanalysis: upon seeing the word molesters, my son asked
 "Molesters? Are they like hamsters?"

 ALL of the pledge of allegiance is subject to constant reanalysis. I remember
 best the part:
 One nation under guard...

 And from the song "God Bless America" the line
 Through the night with a light from a bulb

 The column "Toward more Picturesque Speech" in Readers' Digest is a good
 source of such data.

 JAG
 SUNY

Message 3: RE: 3.703 Reanalyses

Here are a couple I've read recently, both from in-flight airline
magazines:

	1) using "undo" for "undue", as in (this isn't verbatim--I can't
remember the exact phrase used) "without undo regret"

	2) "...she thought she might enjoy "wiling away the time" with her
neighbor's husband
		(I thought this a clever and hilarious pun until I showed it to a
friend, who saw nothing funny about it.)

A couple from childhood memorization misunderstandings:
	1) "we three kings of orrie and tar" (I remember thinking that I
knew what tar was, but what on earth was "orrie"? no matter, I didn't
know what myrrh was either--those kings had lots of exotic stuff)
	2) "conceited by the Holy Ghost" (surely not "conceded," since I
couldn't have known what that meant at age 7 or so); this was my
improvement on what must be a sloppy pronunciation--everyone else said
"conceived", but they also said "often" without the "t", so their
example was clearly not to be followed

I have a hard time swallowing "elemental B", by the way. By the time
a child had any notion what "elemental" meant, such that it
distinguished one kind of B from another, he or she would also have
discovered that that stretch of the "abc jingle" was more letters of
the alphabet.

I've heard that Tonto's name for the Lone Ranger, [kimosabe]
(according to the TV series of the 50's or so), is an English
pronunciation of the Portuguese words _quem o sabe_ 'who knows him?'
 Can anyone corroborate this? Was the Lone Ranger story written in
Portuguese before the English TV show popularized this name?

Christine Kamprath

In Vol 3-703 Mark Mandel objects to my contention that
the spelling 'imput' might well be perfectly natural
(since human beings naturally like to spell things
at something like their phonemic representations
(actually, more superficial than that, but that
does not matter here)). The objection is that, unlike
in my examples of phonemic (or subphonemic) spelling from
other languages (in this case, Dutch), the English spelling
in question is atypical of its own language (English does
NOT normally indicate this assimilation in writing).

But that is precisely the point! We are dealing with
a substandard spelling which shows, we hope, what people
would like to do, not what they have been taught normatively
how to do.

I don't have the source, but I recall reading recently that a medical
school was putting together a list of what we would call reanalyses of
medical terms. The one that comes to mind from the article, and one
that may have already been cited during this thread, is "oldtimers
disease" for "Altzheimer's disease." The school in question set out
to do this because they found that their students and interns had
trouble communicating with medically naive patients and they wanted to
provide some sort of lexicon for them.

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University

Message 6: Re: 3.703 Reanalyses

>Date: Thu, 17 Sep 92 09:20:13 CST
>From: (Dennis Baron) <baronux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
>Subject: reanalysis
>...
>Here's another one: last night I was reading "The Berenstain Bears
>Forget Their Manners" to my 3 year old son. In the text, Papa Bear
>calls a driver he has just bunked [sic; another kid term] into a
>pinhead or some such.

just a bit of dialect trivia: _bunk_ 'bump' is a venerable new york city
lexical item, originally from the dutch (they got there first, remember).
i grew up saying 'guess who i bunked into today!' and 'i bunked my elbow'
and so forth. when i started reading and seeing _bump_ where i would say
_bunk_, i just assumed it was one of those funny spellings, like _clothes_
/klowz/ or _wednesday_ /wenzdi/. it wasn't till i took a dialect geography
course at nyu that i learned they were in fact distinct lexical items. by
the way, pennsylvania dutch speakers apparently say _bunker_ for '[car] bumper'
but new yorkers don't.

addendum: after 25 years of living outside of nyc, i have come to say _bump
into someone_ but i STILL _bunk_ my elbow--somehow _bump one's elbow_ fails
to capture for me that special feeling of hitting the funny bone. go figure...

in another vein, after reading claudia brugman's confession about the lyrics
of _silent night_, i'll own up to having believed that _the battle hymn of
the republic_ was about vitamin pills. i can't remember how (i thought) it
went, but there was definitely a rousing 'vitamin a' in there somewheres.

in the area of things like _take a different tact_, one hears (and reads)
_no holes barred_, _digestive track_, _prostrate gland_, _exhilarator_
('accelerator'), and _sparkling paste_ ('spackling...'). my all-time favorite,
though, is something i saw once in a freshman composition and leave as an
exercise to the reader to gloss:

'it's a doggie-dog world.'

Message 7: Re: 3.703 Reanalyses

I would like to submit the following two strabge but genuine cases of
reanalysis, which my father tells me he did as a child in the 1930ies,
under the influence of heavy Catholic Catechization, and the Latin Mass.
The garden of Gethsemani (where Christ suffered), was for him the
garden of Jef Semani. (Jef is a common Flemish first name).
In the Latin Pater Noster or Lord's Prayer, he heard:
sicut et nos dimikimus debitoribus nostris. (instead of dimittimus)
[miki mus] was the local Flemish pronunciation for Mickey Mouse.
Such mishearings are, I would think, reinforced by a child's desperate
attempt to make some sense of something quite obscure.
Willem J. de Reuse
Departement of Anthropology
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

Message 8: Re: 3.677 Reanalyses

Another famous one similar to "misled" is "bed-raggled" (how you look
when you first get up). Also, I often stumble over "bedridden"(buhDRIdden),
"outrage" (pronounced as if French, ooTRAGE), and, because it is a keyword
in my dictionary so i often see it as I am flipping pages, "barfly"
(BARF-ly, as in, presumably, "John was a bit barfly after spending three
whole days at the pub"). And Jerry Sadock says that his son, Ben, first
though that "farfetched" must be a Yiddish word, because of the prefix.
As for misinterpretations of the "Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear" type,
last year (or was it the year before?), I kept hearing "the 62nd
All-Star Game" (baseball) as "the sixty-second All-Star Game" (i.e.,
one minute long). And A friend's daughter thought the dark blue color was
called "maybe blue" (not "navy blue"), because "maybe it's blue and
maybe it's black" (that one's my all-time favorite). Then there's
that phrase I keep hearing on the radio traffic report: "salad on
the Eisenhower." Truly (I swear!), the first time I heard this I thought
it was some kind of metaphor for a real jumble of traffic, like a tossed
salad. Imagine my disappointment when I realized this was just "solid
(i.e., solid traffic) on the Eisenhower" in a Chicago accent...
 Best wishes,
 Nancy L. Dray
P.S. I almost forgot "assuage," a word I learned from reading and always
pronounced "aSEWage" until people started laughing at me. Also, for
non-Chicagoans, the Eisenhower is an expressway.