At first glance the book's title seems to imply a study of malapropisms or parodies, as the definition of the original phrase was a "dud" or something that didn't live up to expected potential. But I've gone ahead and ordered the book and will report back here whether it's a damp squib or ...

Surfing on the holiday theme-- Back to Slava's (I think) point about recycling previously posted words, another drawback is they don't carry over the various commentary from previous incarnations and in effect start all over again. This also deprives those seeing it for the first time. Hogmanay, for...

I've been on an Amazon spree lately (the books, not so much the women) and came across this title on modern vernacular, reminiscent of this topic.

Wondered if anyone had read it

Just a bump for the day....

My grandmother had a friend on the opposite side of
the street, diagonal from her house, and she always
referred to it as "kittywampus", hence I do too.

Apparently confusing kittywampus with kittycorner...

Or did she mean the house itself was actually askew?

Or both?

... perhaps we could dig up some of the folks who couldn't say shibboleth correctly.

Dig this guy...

(edit: formatting error corrected)

During the summer I was up late in my kitchen surfing YouTube tangents and came across some British kids doing their version of a comedy sketch, dropping into laughter and so on... Then out of nowhere a barred owl alighted (alit?) right outside my window and called inside, apparently hearing the kid...

Very cool -- Cornell has one of the best online libraries of bird sounds. They've done their homework over the years

Romansh is correct. Also seen it spelled Romanche.

When I was living in Europe I tuned in a Swiss radio broadcast in Romansh. Sonically very Italianish, and I found I could follow a lot of it just from applying knowledge of French.

More on Romansh

I find it very interesting that you say French is Latin as spoken in France today. It is a Romance language, true, and a descendant of Latin, but to call it that is quite a statement that I have never seen before. Very interesting. Would you say the same concerning Romanian, Italian, Spanish, or Po...

I'm into birds and their speech, so I looked it up (original article, presumably, is now here ) It was a source of fascination long ago to learn that a bird in New England will carry its song with a different regional dialect than the same bird in the Carolinas, or one in the deep South. This abstra...

Now here's a nice bump. I hadn't seen this before- great to have this resource. This paragraph in the article hung me up: >> However, such tests are not always clear-cut. Unintelligible dialects are sometimes combined into one language if they share a literature or other cultural heritage. And the r...

- things most people could care less about (sorry if I offended any of my cyber friends with these examples.)

Not the examples anyway...

... I imagine that even we wordaholics wouldn't go so far as to boycott an enterprise becasue it has made a grammatical error. A million years ago I was on the air at a public radio station pitching for money late at night, and the phones were dead-- then we got a call from an English teacher who l...

Salad is a modern manifestation of "salted." In modern Spanish, the word is " ensalada ," which literally means "salted." I imagine salt was the preferred salad dressing in the days when people spoke Latin. I had no idea of this derivation. Not long ago I took a cousin...