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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Sunday the preacher (who is my son’s age and a good friend of his as well as mine) said four times, very clearly, the word anticdote . E.g.
Notice that I said the antidote to anxiety, not the anticdote. [= ±: We don’t need somebody to tell us stories about being anxious, but to show us a way to stop doing it.]
My guess is that he was caught up by somebody for messing up the antidote-anecdote distinction (he’s from Pennsylvania, you have to make allowances for them), and carefully learned not to say the version with the c before the d when you mean a cure for poison. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the slip-up so clearly and deliberately repeated. It’s easily enough just a phonological blend bringing the t from antidote and the ec from anecdote, but perhaps it also brings in the (antiquated?) notion of an entertaining story being a kind of antic performance. (Some antics, playing around with meaning, gets rather complicated, at times.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-03-10 11:15:53)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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