Tried to watch Safe Men, another horrible movie from that "Best Movies You've Never Seen" list. Another horrible movie. I think I made it ten minutes before yanking the disc out of the DVD player, flinging it across the room, and then stomping on it while screaming and crying. Just kidding. I just put it back in its envelope and went ahead and did the same for the other movie I got from that list. Instead I watched The Player, which is clearly full of inside Hollywood jokes that I don't get and lots of celebrity cameos. Whoopi Goldberg has the best role by far as a detective in Pasadena. In what I think is the best scene in the whole movie and possibly any movie, she interrogates Tim Robbins while winging a tampon around. (Unused.) Is that not reason enough to watch this movie? She OWNS the scene. This woman deserves respect.
But I was going to tell you two different things relating to yesterday's blog.
One is this item from Mental Floss:
"You probably know that the modern forms of some words have lost letters, as if by magick. But not all letters that are 'lost' disappear. Some of them just move around. 'False-splitting' occurs when speakers and writers unwittingly redraw the boundaries between words and their articles. It's a phenomenon that made a few Middle English words less valuable in Scrabble."
Today: Originally:
An apron A napron
A newt An eute
An umpire A noumpere
A nickname An eke name ('an added name')
An apple A napple
Tell me that is not fascinating.
The other item is my theory about the source of why people are confusing the apostrophe s. I think it came from the name signs on houses or those painted on mailboxes:
The Johnson's
What this means is that it is the Johnson's house or the Johnson's mailbox, as in belonging to the people named Johnson. And in fact, this sign should probably read The Johnsons' because it belongs to a group of people named Johnson, but I think the s apostrophe has fallen out of favor as the way of showing the possessive of a plural. But instead of reading The Johnson's as the Johnson's house, people read this as: there are multiple Johnsons here. A house of Johnsons, which sounds like the box of penis, so maybe I should have used a different name for this example. Maybe that house IS full of johnsons. Well, anyway... that's my theory.
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