Ask Lemmy

My favorite lately: "you don't want to get two birds stoned at once"

Part of what makes Klein’s Don’t Starve game so quirky and fun is the rampant use of creatures that are portmanteau’s of other creatures.

Beefalo

Deerclops

Koalephant

Catcoon

That's a new one. I didn't know about malapropisms. There is a daily wordle style game I cannot think of what it is called for portmanteaus.

Tim Apple.

Relevant xkcd.

My favorites are Dr. Richard Chopp (a urologist) and Les McBurney (a fire chief).

Armand Hammer's fortune came from petroleum, not baking soda, but he supposedly bought a stake in Church & Dwight just for the pun of it.

You would like german. The word "umfahren" can mean to drive around something or it can mean to run something over, depending on how you pronounce it.

I wonder if there's a word for when a whole phrase has two opposite meanings without one of the words in it being a contronym (or using sarcasm, etc)

The example that made me think of this is a song lyric:

And she's dancing like she's never danced before!

There's the intended meaning of better than ever... But if I were to dance it would also be like I've never danced before.

Also known as autoantonym (antonym of itself). e.g. "Because of my oversight, my project is finished."

Did the person make an oversight, i.e. a mistake, and now his project is done for?

Or did the person's well-adjusted oversight, i.e. management, help complete his project on time?

Lol Shakespeare the OG rapper:

From Family Guy: I'm not saying she's a gold digger, but she ain't messing with any.....who isn't she messing with?

The Sphinx : Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...

Mr. Furious : ...your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say. Right? Right?

The Sphinx : Not necessarily.

And lisp having an S in it or rhotacism having an R. Ironic: yes, cruel: definitely!

Totally! Like aipohphobia is the fear of palindromes.

I love that the term glottal stop is a perfect example of a glottal stop.

Say it with me, boys:

Squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel squirrel.

I once did something sort of like this.

Back in the early days of the internet, I was on IRC playing trivia. Often people would talk about wag or wagging. I didn't know exactly what it meant but I'm pretty good at inferring from context clues... usually.

They asked a Star Wars question and of course I knew it right away. I realized in the moment I was practically wagging in anticipation of being correct and I announced it as my first wag.

Of course, wag stood for wild ass guess so I had gotten the meaning completely backward. It still haunts me to this day, some 35+ years later, even though no one but me probably knew about my mistake.

Reminds me of [email protected]

Cool. Similar to anglicism. also, cognate comes to mind here since talking about words between languages.

The infamous Handy that I'm typing this on.

In linguistics this is called expletive infixation. It's a good example of the inherent grammar of language that we are never directly taught but know anyway. For example, we know fanfuckingtastic is correct but fantafuckingstic is wrong.

I had an Austin Powers shirt with lines similar to: 'fanf*ckingtastic' all over it , lol. There is a word for everything.

I always knew it as transposing the beginning sounds of two words like: fons of tun instead of tons of fun.

“She wrote me one of those John Deere letters…”

No, he calls it an Emordnilap. I did see it but I knew of Semordnilaps for awhile now. I DO like Micheal Steven's take on all of his linguistic subjects. Dude is a genius educator.

Edit: lmao I chuckled at your username.

Cancan and gogo?

I did, op almost definitely did!