(no subject)

[naath]

Ridiculously irritating thing of the day:

People who treat the word Halloween as Hallo-ween rather than Hallow-een and then proceed to make up words like "Jesus-ween" or "sexy-ween" or "Howl-o-ween" (this is a selection of things I've actually seen; I'm not intending to comment on the content intended).

It is All Hallows Eve(ning); the 'w' is part of "hallows" not "evening".

I just... don't understand why people do this.


(Also I've decided I'm going to try to post one thing that's been bugging me/on my mind/happens to sound interesting every day in November; instead of trying to write a novel which clearly would not work).

Comments

[liv]

I think howl-o-ween is ok, because it's clearly a pun on hallow. The others I agree are really annoying.

And I'm (selfishly) much in favour of NaBloPoMo type approaches to Nano, cos I get much more benefit out of people posting more often than I do out of people writing first drafts of half a novel.

[ptc24]

Jesus-ween: the celebration of supernatural entities from beyond the grave on Oct 31? Have these people not thought this through?

[pseudomonas]

I think it's natural for a speaker to somehow split words that they find opaque along syllable boundaries, or something. Like hyphenation rules.

My favourite example of this is the number of helicopter-related words that are either heli[something] or [something]copter, despite the word breaking etymologically as helico/pter.

[naath]

I guess the way I say it Halloween doesn't come out as "hallo-ween" more "hallo'een" so it looks strange to me.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

You're such a catholic atheist :-p :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL! I guess that sums it up.

I had a conversation at work that basically went "Why is everyone in south/west europe on holiday tomorrow? oh, yeah, right, I guess people would celebrate all saints day, I forgot..." :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree that's very annoying, and if I'd heard it I'd probably want to strangle someone. But OTOH, people always make portmanteaus ignorant of the etymology, it's not a surprise... :)

[simont]

Also, there's a practical consideration of whether it's actually feasible for the listener to figure out what words have been portmanteaued. If I heard "Jesuseen" I'd probably say "what?", but "Jesusween" gives me more of a fighting chance if I've never heard the expression before (which, before I read this post, I hadn't).

Similarly with foo-copter (for assorted foo) – "foo-opter" sounds like somebody choosing a foo, so it's practically useful to include the c.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yeah yeah.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, "Jesus-een" would presumably be Christmas Eve, or maybe Easter Saturday, although we already have words for those. But presumably "Jesus-ween" means "Like Halloween but with Jesus"? What is that -- is that like "dressing up as Jesus" or "dressing up at christmas" or "a midnight all saints service"?

So in fact, even if the etymology is dodgy, presumably there's actual useful meaning used by dragging the "w" along, if it shows you're mashing up "halloweeen" and not just "-een".

I hadn't expected this question to be so linguistic :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

This is probably the reason.

However I fundamentally think "ween" sounds silly... which I think is adding to my dislike of this thing.

Is it really hellic-opter not helli-copter? I'd never thought about that before. I guess this annoyance is bizarely specific.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think "Jesus-ween" is because "halloween is EVIL" or something. Which is odd because I always thought of it as a Christian holiday... (the pagan holiday that shares the date is Samhain).

I think the idea is that you hand out goddly pamphlets instead of candy and maybe dress up as apostles rather than "sexy big bird"...

[simont]

Yes, it's "helic" (as in "helical", here meaning just spirally/twirly in general) + "opter" (meaning wing, see also ornithopter and gyropter and Coleoptera and Lepidoptera and assorted others that don't have the c).

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, that makes sense. I was thinking "heli" as in "sun"... which is not really relevant!

[simont]

Although I suppose that example might work the other way round: it's a mistake to leave the c in if what you're trying to do is describe a totally different class of winged vehicle or animal, but if what you're trying to do is describe a subclass of helicopter (e.g. the Batcopter) then you precisely do want to include some vestige of the "helic" part.

Quite where that leaves "ROFLcopter" I have no idea, since I don't really understand its semantic connection with wings of any kind :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that either, but I looked it up when Simon said :)

I guess this annoyance is bizarely specific.

I guess it's a combination of (a) anything that's a living etymology to me is annoying when someone else treats it as a dead etymology, even though I do the same thing myself with "piano" and "bus" and so on, and (b) lots of the X-ween things sound stupid and are stupid things, so they're legitimately annoying anyway, and the annoying etymology serves as a convenient lightning rod.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Another obvious example of this kind of resegmentation and reanalysis is alcohol-ic -> alco-holic, producing chocoholic, workaholic etc. Or even the creation of -gate from Watergate as a marker of political scandal.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Doh! Yeah, I vaguely remember that, and I guess Jesus-ween is an... appropriate name for it, I just hadn't expected someone in the UK to hear it much. I think I assumed "jesus-ween" would refer to something non-stupid, which in retrospect was really very foolish :)

I always thought of it as a Christian holiday...

I guess it's christian the way the (christian) devil is christian -- only of relevance to a christianity-centric culture, but not necessarily pro christian :)

sexy big bird...

ROFL!

[hatter.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if that's MOANvember or NaNoWhineMo but it sounds an entertaining project anyhow.


the hatter

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I have never thought that there is no such thing as chocohol and workahol before, but now you point it out it is so obviously wrong! :-) Yay for lazy language joy.

[chess]

Whereas I've often heard people complaining that someone's on the workahol again when they're working too much, etc... huzzah for bizarre linguistic re-formations :)

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I think I stopped being irritated by that sort of thing when robert_jones pointed out that it's just a linguistic shift. Whereas our ancestors constructed portmanteau words by going back to etymology, nowadays people construct them more straightforwardly based on the current word only, picking whatever sounds best. And that's OK.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Why do you assume it's ignorance?

My take on it is that 'Halloween' is a word just as 'Hallow' and 'e'en' are word, and if people want to make portmanteaus based on a current word rather than on one of the two more old-fashioned words on which it's based, then that's a perfectly OK thing to do. It doesn't necessarily mean they don't know the old words, it just means they've chosen not to use them.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think I got a lot less worried about new coinages when I started thinking of them as the natural process of linguistics (which shouldn't prioritise whichever version of language happened to get frozen into written form if it's still developing usefully).

But there's some things that annoy me even if I think they shouldn't (primarily ones that obliterate a distinction I'm used to or sound ignorant even if they're not.)

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

That's perfectly understandable. I get annoyed by lots of things I shouldn't, just not this one.