Word Nerds

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Tito

May be interested in this article in the January 31, 2008 issue of New Scientist.

Another amateur site that the pros turn to is the Wordlustitude blog, written by Mark Peters (see “How Wordlustitude feeds my obsession”). He has tracked the use of infixes - words inserted into the middle of other words. Some of the best-known examples come from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons, where the eternally cheerful character Ned Flanders has coined phrases such as “in-diddly-different” and “wel-diddly-come”. Peters’s collection of “diddly” words caught the attention of Michael Adams, a linguist at Indiana University, Bloomington. According to Adams, infixes have been used in poetry for centuries but spoken infixes have appeared only in the last few decades. Peters’s collection provides further evidence that this is true.

Anywho, off to see U2 in 3-diddly-D tonight. All reports so far being that it is Bonolicious.

» Filed Under

Comments

Comments are closed.