Comments on: Guardian 25,208 Prize Puzzle by Araucaria

By: Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:24:31 +0000

When it comes to Spoonerisms I take the Town Drain.. and pass

By: ofHesselink

ofHesselink — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:10:45 +0000

I personally enjoyed your morphemes immensely, Stella (though I confess, tupu’s I enjoyed even more). Now yer man from Antrim who fails either to vocalise or even slightly aspirate his thieves; he is an interloper and a vicious impostor of the worst sort. Yer Cork fella, well I’ll let him away with it. Either that or it’s your ears, acushla.

By: Stella

Stella — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:04:52 +0000

None taken Robi, the boot’s on the other foot when it comes to scientific/IT terms

By: Robi

Robi — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:18:43 +0000

P.S. Should that be struggling or trudging?

By: Robi

Robi — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:16:48 +0000

Tupu; nice one! Stella, no offence, I’m just an ignorant old scientist strugging to learn how to do crosswords.

By: Stella

Stella — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:11:37 +0000

Sorry all, they’re familiar words to me as a linguist, and I tend to assume that crossword buffs have a similar vocabulary range. Anyway, what’s wrong with a new term now and then? That’s the sort of thing we’re here for, isn’t it?

Re Irishmen, the two I’ve known reasonably well – a uni colleague and my daughter’s boyfriend – both pronounce a sound more similar to ‘t’ than unvoiced ‘th’(or Greek theta). The former is from County Antrim, the latter from Cork.

By: tupu

tupu — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:03:09 +0000

Come on Lobi – evelyone knows Dyslalia was a 19th Century Plime Minister whose speech became slurred when he became addicted to morpheme.

By: Robi

Robi — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:29:52 +0000

Crikey Stella @13 – morphemes and dyslalia; thought I had put away the dictionaries for today.

I have managed up to now to resist the urge to comment on the Rev.S., but I still think the ‘well-boiled icicle’ doesn’t really fit with the definitions……….. oh, well, I’ll just call it a spoonerism instead!

By: tupu

tupu — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:05:29 +0000

For what it is worth, the 2010 OED defines spoonerism as ‘An accidental transposition of the initial sounds, or other parts, of two or more words’ and COD says much the same.

By: ofHesselink

ofHesselink — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:52:42 +0000

Hi, PeeDee. “mixing up his words” isn’t really a description of what the Rev was famous for. Hence, perhaps, some of the slight dissatisfaction (chez moi, at least) with the clues proceeding therefrom. “Transposing the initial letters of two consecutive words in a sentence in order, perhaps unwittingly, to produce plausible and amusing alternatives” is a slightly better stab at it, I think. I welcome disagreement.
Robi, not surprised you didn’t get the Irish ‘t’ief’. That’s because roughly half the population of Ireland who live north of a line drawn beetween Dublin and Galway don’t pronounce any such word in that way. Even the rest produce an actual aspiration, so I confess to being slightly disappointed with Araucaria this time (though I did get the answer)