Comments on: defibulator

By: Who Put the Inch in Peninsula? « Literal-Minded

Who Put the Inch in Peninsula? « Literal-Minded — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:00:29 +0000

[...] now more inclined to go with a morphological analysis, like the ones proposed for nucular and defibulator. Just as nuclear gets reshaped to end with what looks like a suffix in words like molecular and [...]

By: david hill

david hill — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 19:02:54 +0000

But is there no possibility of meaning for phono analogies?

Lieberry: Place where all the books are willingly untrue.

Defibulator: Scientology slang for the requisite machine.

Nucular: Directed adjective for target of threatened or promised nuclear attack who is also lacking in truthfulness: 'I'm going to nuke you, l(i)ar!,' particularly in speakers of a West Texas dialect.

Massatwosetts: Archaic, name for former English colony and later U.S. state priot to 1828; ie, when Maine achieved statehood. Also, Cape Cod slang for result of mix-up of multiple sets of golf equipment.

By: Bob Kennedy

Bob Kennedy — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:48:08 +0000

Interesting point re: va{s}cillate, Trochee. I think the word that primed me for this was actually oscillate.

By: Trochee

Trochee — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 20:26:18 +0000

can’t resist the pedantry:

I wonder if the spelling “vascillate” (in place of “vacillate”) is another of these errors-by-analogy, e.g. analogy to “fascicle” or “conscience” where latinate words use “sc” to represent /s/ or esh.

For myself, I thought (until I looked it up just now) that the word was spelled “vaccilate”, on analogy with “vaccine”, perhaps. I had a pronunciation tendency to put a velar stop in too, which I will now attempt to quell.

Just a meta-example of another of these cases where it’s hard to resist spelling/pronouncing like some other word we know better.

By: Ben Zimmer

Ben Zimmer — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 18:16:19 +0000

This sort of anticipatory dissimilation often happens with the /pr/ cluster as well, as in “imp(r)opriety” and “p(r)erogative.”

But “Febuary” is most similar case to “defibulator”, since both simplify /br/ as /bj/.

By: Bob Kennedy

Bob Kennedy — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 03:33:40 +0000

Good examples - I wonder if there’s others out there. And yeah, I think liquid dissimilation might be involved too.

To that end I got a small number of hits for “defillibrator”, in the area of 300.

By: Travis Bradley

Travis Bradley — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 22:13:54 +0000

Two other examples come to mind that show an avoidance of [br] clusters: Febuary (< February) and libary (< library). February gets 2,570,000,000 ghits vs. Febuary’s 4,800,000. Library gets 3,160,000,000 vs. libary’s 3,450,000. In these cases, though, /br/ > /b/ can be attributed to dissimilation with the /r/ of the suffix, and, in the case of Febuary, further analogy with January. (See the entry on http://dictionary.com.) Could defibulator result from liquid dissimilation as well?