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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This one has me scratching my head a bit.
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My daughter was unpacking Christmas decorations with her kids. They have a couple of those beautiful wooden Russian-style nutcrackers, the ones that look like a deranged military officer that opens his jaws and bites down on the nut.
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She caught herself thinking of them repeatedly and once calling them woodpeckers. Something like (she didn’t remember exactly and I don’t remember exactly what she said) “Why don’t you get the woodpeckers out of their boxes.â€
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Why does this substitution seem so natural? (Or does it to you?) If she’d called them flyswatters that wouldn’t seem natural at all, for instance. So it probably isn’t just a bare “activate an Object-Verber noun†that was in her mental search program, though that may have been a part of it.
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Is it just that they are wooden and so an instruction to “activate a wood-Verber noun†got started? They are very thoroughly painted and enameled, and their wooden-ness is actually not a very salient property to me, though I know they are made of wood.
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Would “nailbiters†have worked as well?
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Think I’ll stop wringing my nails over this, get with the season and listen to some Tchaikovsky. Woodpecker Suite, anyone?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Feels pretty natural to me. Of course, as I’ve confessed before, I’m capable of some pretty astonishing off-the-cuff substitutions. (Particularly embarrassing in front of a class….) But this one has a number of triggers. First there’s the fact that both are compounds of the one syllable word + two syllable word variety. And then they both end in “Vcker.” And then there’s the fact that nuts are indeed made of a woody material. And finally both woodpeckers and nutcrackers are breaking up wood-like surfaces. What you got here is a nexus of structural, phonological and semantic analogies, even if some of them are a bit distant. I don’t think I’ve ever perpetrated this one, but it’s well within the range of my subconscious’s spontaneous effusions.
I wouldn’t wrangle my hands about it.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-11-28 15:11:03)
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Suddenly strikes me that nutcracker would be a crackerjack name for a bird. There are nuthatches , and birds do crack snails and things (bugs too, I expect) when they eat them.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-28 19:46:01)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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All this about birds reminds me of someone who called the bird “wheatear” by the name “wheateater”. I suppose it was logical as the bird might have eaten seeds!
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