Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
i wonder if my pets have like a proper language and when i try to speak back to them im just speaking jargon
like for example my cat always speaks to me when I come home and i meow back to her and she’ll meow again & even though i don’t think twice about it to her it’s probably a situation where it’s like
We’ve all heard examples of fake Chinese or German from speakers who lack familiarity with either language. While typically cringe-worthy, these examples do raise interesting questions regarding our own language. What does English sound like to non-English speakers? After more than 40 years, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” remains one of the most illuminating examples.
The entire song is nonsense verse, neither English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that one doesn’t know all that well. This often involves trying to sing a foreign song with nonsense or random words filling in the blanks. Liberman shares this wonderful quote from a random Internet user:
Just for the story, in France, when we don’t speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it “yaourter”(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the “cowboy” accent.
jesus christ this is actually reALLY FRUSTRATING IT SOUNDS LIKE ENGLISH BUT IT DOESNT MAKE WORDS
Oh, this is SO COOL. They got the accents right! It’s amazing!
Also, interestingly, when my parrot heard the video, she wouldn’t stop yelling till I turned it off. Apparently she DOES NOT like sounds that sound like English but don’t make sense.
I was in wonderment and fascinated. This is something I’ve wondered about too, as fascinated as I am with dialect and language. I was having a deeply educational experience.
Speak with Tenderness 