Eggcorn Forum

Re dzhbr and other consonant cluster/clashes:

I often just for fun try to get Spanish-speaking students of English to try this poem, telling them that if they can pronounce it right, they’ve about got English pronunciation licked.

Amidst the mists and coldest frosts/
With barest wrists and stoutest boasts/
He thrusts his fists against the posts/
And still insists he sees the ghosts.

It’s a fun one to say.

Excellent ones. I don’t think I’d heard pyknic or barleychild before.

The spelling of dilapadated matches the meaning. Fun ones, for sure!

I don’t remember ever seeing a singular dungaree…

Yours for dichroic duodena.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-10 20:58:16)

well Jon got my fave: gallivant.

Which is usually done around the countryside with young men, if I recall correctly.

I word I have come across quite a bit lately is

epispasm

“Epispasm” is borrowed from the Greek, where it was used to refer to the operation that reversed circumcision (epi=upon, together, spasm=draw).

I’ve been on a reading program in second temple literature for the last few years, and the word and the topic it represents come up frequently. Josephus, for example, explains how the Hellenizing Jews in the second century BCE faced a problem when they introduced gymnasia into their cities. In the gymnasia games, as the word itself points out (Gr. gymnos=naked), male athletes performed without clothes. Circumcised Jews were derided for the vulgar (to the Greeks) marks of their faith, leading many young Jewish men to seek remediation.

You’ll find more than you want to know about the word and the procedure here: http://www.cirp.org/library/restoration/hall1/

Oddly, the word does not seem to have an entry in the OED.

This thread is chock-a-block with great words!

Canoodle is probably (I haven’t checked) a development from the German “knuddeln” = to cuddle, but certainly I always had the impression a bit more (not a lot more) than cuddling was implied.

I like
symbiotic – no reason, just sounds good to me
fricative, especially labio-dental fricative (Bonzo Dog / Neil Innes fans may know the bizarre song of the same name)
tmesis (one of Stephen Fry’s favourite words which sounds far too high brow for the sort of circum-bloody-stances where it applies)
articulated – sounds, well, articulated, linky, jointed and angular.

As for plosives, harder consonants seem to be funnier. www.laughlab.co.uk found that jokes about ducks were always funnier than the same joke with other les splosive animals substituted (eg weasel – even a stoat is funnier than a weasel) (aside: a weasel is weaselly identified but a stoat is stoatally different). The book Quirkology goes into this a bit more.
I think it was the comedian David Baddiel who discussed his love of the “C” word for it’s shock value and humour entirely based on the hard sounds in it, rather than any other synonym.