macadamia!

stencil on a bus bench, 75th-ish ave and 109th st. especially for bryna.

sigh. darned gravity! on the footbridge in hawrelak, going over the river to laurier park.

This is pure silly, & also rather interesting to me, in terms of etymology. In this little sketch by the absurdist comedians The Vestibules, they list off words that they take great joy in pronouncing & repeating, e.g// bulbous! bouffant! blubber! macadamia! gazeeeebo. (Just go listen and be filled with glee... I love it when people have such fun with language) & while enjoying this (& subsequently infecting myself with a rather powerful earworm) I was also struck by the number of words they used that were derived from Latin, and how few came from the Germanic substrate of English.

A little bit of checking with my etymology dictionary confirmed my suspicions (from the Latin suspectionem, suspectio, via Old French suspeçun) -- funny words in English seem often to be Latin-based. In fact, their only funny word that was part of Middle or Old English and therefore most likely Germanic was blubber (from blober, a bubble). The rest are direct borrowings (mukluk and iglu from Inuktitut, beluga from Russia), words of unknown but likely Scottish dialect with Gaelic influence (shindig, hullaballoo), a few more directly French (bouffant and gabardine) and then the whole plethora (also from the Latin, inspired by Greek) of Latin-via-French: superfluous, tuberculosis, foible, ploy, plethora, spatula, gazebo, galoshes...

So this makes me wonder -- what is it that makes French and Latin-derived words funny to English speakers, even if these words are a pretty regular part of our language. Why aren't our old Germanic words funny? Is it that they are so basic, less superfluous (from the Latin superfluere, 'overflow') like house and anger and hunger and sleep? Do these old words have fewer syllables?

I can understand why the more direct borrowing like 'mukluk' and 'beluga' sound amusing, because they contain sound patterns not found commonly in English. But for the Latinate words, they have been in English a long time and have mutated much more to fit English sound patterns, they are undeniably 'English' words. So it can't be the foreign-ness aspect, I don't think.

Do they lack the 'u' and 'oy' sounds that for some reason, sound amusing? The psychology of why words sound funny or grating has always fascinated me... Like how certain words I cannot stand to hear. I hate the words 'torque' and 'torso', I flinch when I hear them. Yet 'tornado' and 'torment' don't bother me.

I am sure somehow has done some research on this. But anyway, I have been wondering (while I should be working. Sigh.)

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On a slightly related note, I've also been reading a lot lately about phonosemantics and sound symbolism -- the idea that basically morphemes are not the smallest meaningful units in a language, but the phonemes, the basic sounds, have meanings as well. That perhaps, unlike Saussure's arbitrary sign, the sounds of the words themselves have meaning.

Onomatopoeia is one type of sound symbolism, clustering (e.g. words in a language with similar meanings contain similar sounds) and iconity (e.g. looking at words are that also have similar meanings, and looking for regular changes in sound to accompany semantic distinctions) One linguist, Margaret Magnus, makes an interesting case for iconicity, in the words step, and stamp, and tamp and tramp. To sum it up, she feels that 'mp' makes a word more 'intense', as in step vs. stamp, and the r in tramp extends the tamp action which refers to one bounded location as opposed to one that is extended over space/time. Anyway, she has a fascinating webpage that is worth a look. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, however... There's a neuroscientist too, Ramachandran, who discusses sounds as metaphors for images, and cross-modal synaesthesia... and I need to track down John Mitchell's book 'Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments'... It would be very interesting to see what he says, because this is something Iam always aware of when writing... in poetry I think we are most definitely aware of the inherent phonosemantics of our language, even subconsciously, as poem-making is really just about figuring out the recipes for phrases, combining the word that best captures meaning and essence with the words that taste the best when said together.

Anyway. I was supposed to be doing work? Yes, I was. More on all this later, I will finish my half-formed thoughts.

PS: Gourd is a really funny word. But it has to be said 'goooooooooourd' for maximum funny.