Comments on: Monthly Gleanings, Part Two: (August 2009)

By: J P Maher

J P Maher — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:10:17 +0000

More on ilk, milk, pillow etc.
Those who say MELK, PELLOW and ELLINOIS nonetheless write MILK, PILLOW, Illinois…

By: J P Maher

J P Maher — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:05:30 +0000

“Those who say melk and pellow for milk and pillow never say ilk and fillow for elk and fellow.” Non sequitur.

And fillah is attested:
Full text of “When ghost meets ghost”
I believe if I did it once when I was a young fillah I did it fifty times.” “Did what?” ” Well — breathed free on hearing that a girl wasn’t engaged.”
http://www.archive.org/stream/…/whenghostmeetsgh00demo_djvu.txt

This may be eye-dialect for fellah, as feller can also be..

By: Walter Turner

Walter Turner — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:25:09 +0000

Thank you for last week’s discussion of vixen and company. And for this week’s discussion.
But it’s not enough. I’m sure I’m not the only one of your readers who is patting his foot in anticipation of the other volumes of your dictionary.

By: stevo

stevo — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:11:48 +0000

At the end of the paragraph “Language Name” it says “Lojlan”, but it should probably be “Lojban”, the name of the biggest and best known descendent of Loglan.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:02:22 +0000

Yes, please tell us about skedaddle! I see no reason to doubt the story that the OED2 quotations tell us about deadpan: that it began in the 1920s as a technical term in vaudeville based on a slang word but not itself slang, spread to literature by the 1930s, and was in routine use by the TLS by 1949. A quick ascent, but not an unprecedented one. I still think Sam Hill is taboo deformation, which need not follow the rules of ordinary sound change. Consider nerts, a taboo deformation for nuts, clearly developed in a rhotic accent area. STRUT to NURSE is not as far as I know represented elsewhere in English: r's tend to get lost, not created ex nihilo.