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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
This weekend I heard a colleague say that someone’s action was poohbahed by another.
The person meant to say, I’m sure, that the object of scorn was pooh-poohed. The expression “pooh-pooh†is a reduplicative of “pooh,†which is onomatopoetical for the sound of derision made by puffing out the lips and letting the air out with a silent plosive. It is not, as some seem to think, borrowed from the child’s word for excrement–on the contrary, “poo†may in fact come from “pooh†(See our earlier discussion of “poo-poo/pooh-pooh†for more on the confusion of these two terms).
When Gilbert penned the libretto for The Mikado, he gave one of the haughty characters, the Lord-High-Everything-Else who was “born sneering,†the tendentious name “Pooh-bah†(View members of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company doing Pooh-bah’s entrance and aria.). Gilbert probably confected his odd name out of a pair of English derision interjections.
Saying someone was “pooh-bahed,†then, would constitute an eggcorn. Both the verb/interjection “pooh-pooh†and the noun-turned-verb “pooh-bah†share the semantics of extreme haughtiness, but they arrive at the shared semantics via slightly different etymological pathways.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Cool find, and excellent write-up.
.
One quibble: the sound of a silent plosive is nothing. The plosive in this case is voiceless but not soundless; the puff of the aspiration when the plosive is released is what we hear. (Consonants in general, even voiced ones, and particularly plosives [=stops], are heard much more through their effects on neighboring vowels or aspirations than for themselves.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-04-20 12:58:43)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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the sound of a silent plosive is nothing
Indeed. Caught in the act by a credentialed linguist.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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