A Rebel Schwa

I recently noticed a bumper sticker on a car that read (rebəl).

My first thought was that the car must belong to a rebel phonetician.

This phonetician obviously rebels by using parentheses instead of backslashes and by combining International Phonetic Alphabet symbols with standard English orthography (if it wasn't for the schwa I might not have even noticed).

Little did I know, there is a Christian rapper named Lecrea and (rebəl), spelled as such, is the title of one of his albums.



By the way, here is the complete phonetic transcription of the word rebel:

/rɛbəl/

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part D)

A continuation of the series.

Drag´gle-tail`:n. 1. A slattern who suffers her gown to trail in the mire; a drabble-tail.

From thefreedictionary.com

Austin Powers Takes a Powder

I passed a truck on the expressway last week and at an 80 mph + glance I was only able to catch the name of the company printed on the side of the truck. I had never heard of the company and had no idea what they did.

Upon seeing the name, I initially thought the company owners were being creative in naming their business by using wordplay and the popularity of the Austin Powers movie franchise to attract customers.



So much for my theory. I later found out that Austin Powder Co. is the oldest manufacturing enterprise in Cleveland. It was formed in 1833 by five brothers with the last name of Austin (not by Austin Powers).

Oh, and the powder referred to in the name of the company is explosive powder.

Austin Powder

Doctor's Appointment or Doctor Appointment

I often wonder why it is so common to hear a person say, "I have a doctor's appointment."


The noun phrase "doctor's appointment" is possessive. It is an appointment that the doctor possesses, not the patient.

So technically when a patient is speaking about his or her appointment with a doctor, the patient should say I have a doctor appointment. "Doctor" modifies "appointment" and tells what kind of appointment the patient has.

A "doctor's appointment" could be an appointment the doctor has with his girlfriend, his psychiatrist, or his dentist (or any other person for that matter).

Think of it this way, do you ever hear a person say I have a dentist's appointment?

Unfortunately, "doctor's appointment" still seems to be the preferred phrasing as exhibited by the screen shots and by Grammar Girl's take on the situation.

The following is a comment from Grammar Girl in response to a question about this subject on on4/30/2007 4:49:09 AM.

I've looked this up in a bunch of different places. I found conflicting answering, none of which seemed definitively convincing. I prefer "doctor appointment" because it makes more sense to me (it's my appointment with the doctor, so doctor is modifying appointment), but "doctor's appointment" seems to be more common.Sorry I can't be more helpful!

Here is my personal favorite of the screen shots (note the name of the web site).

How will people ever get it straight when a site named Health in Plain English can't even get it?

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part C)

A continuation of the series.


collieshangie \ˈkä-lē-ˌshaŋ-ē, ˈkə-\: A noisy quarrel or dispute; a confused uproar.

But there is just the one thing that I wish you would bear in view, if it was only long enough to discuss it quietly; for there is going to be a collieshangie when we two get home.
—Catriona

From Wordnik

Linguistic Cartoon Favorites - Your Own Words

An oldie but a goodie.






Thanks for the laugh Bill Watterson.

Puzzle Published in Speculative Grammarian

I am honored to announce that Speculative Grammarian recently published a wordplay puzzle that I created.

Here is a link to the issue:
SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN
Volume CLIX, Number 4, September 2010

And here is a link to the page on which the puzzle appears:

A Brief Puzzlicious Interlude

The puzzle was previously published on this blog as Wordplay for Phoneticians

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z (Part B)

A continuation of the series.



Buncombe: (bungk' um) - Obvious nonsense spoken as truth.
A favorite word of author and journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Harvey's still spreading that same old buncombe about his being descended from royalty.

From Wayne State University's Word Warriors

Back-to-School Spelling Humor

Image from an e-mail I received.

Unusual Words Defined: A - Z

To kick off the new school year I am going to begin featuring a weekly, definition-based post. Each week I will post an unusual word that I have come across either in my readings or in conversations and its definition. To balance out the unusualness of the words, I will stick to the tradition of following the alphabet each week, thus I will commence with an unusual word beginning with the letter "a".

Absquatulate: to make off, decamp, or abscond.

A writer in the New Orleans Weekly Picayune in December 1839 noted that the origin of the word lay in squat, to which had been added the Latin prefix ab– (from abscond), meaning “off, away”, and the verb ending –ulate (borrowed from words like perambulate), so making a word meaning to get up and depart quickly. Or, as a writer in the old Vanity Fair magazine in 1875 elaborated: “They dusted, vamosed the ranch, made tracks, cut dirt, hoed it out of there”.

-excerpted from Michael Quinion's World Wide Words

And from an on-line version of the Oxford English Dictionary (accessed through a private account):

[A factitious word, simulating a L. form (cf. abscond, gratulate) of American origin, and jocular use.]
To make off, decamp.
1837-40 HALIBURTON Clockmaker (1862) 363 Absquotilate it in style, you old skunk,..and show the gentlemen what you can do. 1858 DOW Serm. I. 309 in Bartlett Dict. Amer., Hope's brightest visions absquatulate. 1861 J. LAMONT Seahorses xi. 179 He [an old bull-walrus] heard us, and lazily awaking, raised his head and prepared to absquatulate.