Grid takes off her derpants
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I'm going to play this for my morphology class next week when we start talking about affixation… but there's no reason why you all shouldn't enjoy it now, now, now!
Thanks to Alex Trueman.
If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out this oldie but goodie: How I met my wife. Happy Valentine's, if you're into that sort of thing!
John said,
February 14, 2012 @ 2:07 pm
Gloss, by David McCord
http://ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/mccord.html
John said,
February 14, 2012 @ 2:09 pm
Too quick, here it is:
I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro-? No, he's just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.
When life turns sipid and the mind is traught,
The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.
Chalantly then, like any gainly goof,
My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.
Heidi Harley said,
February 14, 2012 @ 2:27 pm
Sorry all, took me a while to figure out what was going wrong with my iframe embedding. Very rusty, me.
rootlesscosmo said,
February 14, 2012 @ 3:51 pm
Tripod are really wonderful. Their "Make You Happy Tonight" is a fine illustration of the principle that successful parody requires full command of the style or genre being imitated.
Dennis Paul Himes said,
February 15, 2012 @ 10:06 am
HH: "Sorry all, took me a while to figure out what was going wrong with my iframe embedding."
It's always frustrating when your iframe is bedded.
Dennis Paul Himes said,
February 15, 2012 @ 10:07 am
Although really, that should be "when your iframe is exbedded".
Eric P Smith said,
February 15, 2012 @ 3:01 pm
I enjoy this kind of humour, but I can enjoy particular examples hugely or not at all. I think this is a very individual thing. I enjoyed the Tripod clip at the start where they remove negative prefixes to form an unusual or nonexistent positive. I enjoyed the examples whether they were invented ("astrous") or merely unusual or old usages ("kempt", which simply means "combed", after all). I felt bewildered to realise that some people find words amusing that are still in my idiolect ("scrutable", "seemly"). I found the clip more pointless and less enjoyable as it evolved through other prefixes and into letter-sequences that are not prefixes at all. As for "takes off her derpants" … please!
Personally I’m not amused by cases like "ept" or "sipid" which merely replace standard forms ("apt" and "sapid"). Others may find them amusing for precisely that quality.
"How I met my wife" I find excellent.
Around 1970 I came across:
"Gainly, gruntled and kempt" remains my all-time favourite line in this genre.
Eric P Smith said,
February 15, 2012 @ 3:03 pm
Apologies for the formatting of the short quoted verse. It looked fine in preview.
DRK said,
February 15, 2012 @ 11:33 pm
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.
Tripod and Ogden Nash. Perfect!
Minniecrun said,
February 16, 2012 @ 5:23 am
For an extended discussion of "How I met my wife", you might want to look at a book called Jokes and the Linguistic Mind by Debra Aarons in which she has a chapter on these sorts of processes and how strings can be reanalized as morphemes.
Steve F said,
February 20, 2012 @ 8:43 am
Having read the post and the comments but not followed the links, I was reminded of a really good example of this sort of thing that I knew I had kept somewher on my hard drive, but I couldn't remember its title. It took me fifteen minutes of searching but I found it eventually. It's called 'How I Met my Wife'. Damn.
Just another Peter said,
February 26, 2012 @ 6:07 pm
Another couple of Tripod songs with a linguistic bent are:
Txt Msgs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYB5TsA60r8
Cuckold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRUh7sb4c-M
Private Zydeco said,
May 18, 2012 @ 2:38 am
"so canny as to be nerving." Clingybum Fiscalbars