Yally-teep

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Following up on "Words: Too many? Too few?", T-Rex is discussing lexical issues again:

Mousover title: "as the French say – or will soon say if they know what's good for them – c'est TRES yally-teep."

Seems like the French would spell it more like yalitype or something. And the adjectival form would be something like yalitypable, right? Or maybe they borrowed it from English, where it doesn't exist except in this comic?

Meanwhile, T-Rex has been gnawing on the lexicon pretty regularly — the previous comic:

Mouseover title: "please, speak plainly. tell me thou hadst pooped in a special room with a special bowl that was half-filled with what was, up until that moment, perfectly potable water"

See also "The miserable French language and its inadequacies", 9/30/2005, for other ideas about gifts for la Francophonie.



32 Comments

  1. jin defang said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:25 am

    Jin has invented words from time to time, but can't get the OED to officialize (there, another new one that my spell check is unhappy with) them. To get around the masculine-feminine-neuter problem, "sheit" would be perfect—hate the use of "they" for singular. And the opposite of improvement could be "deprove," which in Jin's opinion is more common than improve and therefore should be honored with an opposite.

    Don't any of y'all invent words, too?

  2. Philip Taylor said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:30 am

    Only accidentally. But I do like the probable pronunciation of "sheit" :)

  3. Sili said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:33 am

    Stop trying to make yally-teep happen.

  4. Thomas Lee Hutcheson said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:38 am

    English badly need a word set meaning [speaker and to persons addressed/speaker and a third person(s)].
    The differentiation of inside corner and outside corner would be nice, too.

  5. Victor Mair said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:52 am

    @jin defefang

    Love "sheit"!

    Yes, "deprove" and "deprovement" would be very nice to have.

  6. Philip Taylor said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 6:56 am

    But if the opposite of "implode" is "explode", should not the opposite of "improve" be "exprove" ?

  7. jin defang said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 7:15 am

    here's another—unpublish, as in someone/s deleting something sheit doesn't like from the internet, publication—maybe even someone else's publication.

    To Philip Taylor, sheit is pronounced "sheet," but I accept your pronunciation. Once had a student surnamed Scheiss, which I pronounced in the proper German way, to her obvious discomfort. It's "Shessh," she corrected.

  8. bks said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 8:13 am

    No need for "yally-teep" when we already have "pooty tang"
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pootie_Tang

  9. Kent McKeever said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 8:34 am

    In regard to the sheitty discussion of poiticized pronouns: If we spell "they" in its new sense as "thay," a written text can be made more exact. In a spoken context, I suspect most English speakers would pronounce the words identically. Theirs could be thairs. Ditto. — Kent

  10. cameron said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 10:09 am

    with the spelling "s/he/it", that gender-inclusive pronoun was already in use in Church of the Subgenius circles back in the 90s.

    https://www.subgenius.com/stang/X0015_Dallas_98.html

    https://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/drill97/X0003_7-13-97-1.html

    https://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/evils/politics/X0011_MARX.TXT.html

    I remember it being introduced in one of the Subgenius comics in the very early 90s, but can't find a link to that

  11. Cervantes said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 12:05 pm

    Te quiero in Spanish can mean I love you, or I want you, but people generally don't get confused about this, you get it from the context. I expect the same is true with je t'aime.

  12. Richard Hershberger said,

    November 2, 2022 @ 12:46 pm

    My editor recently made me change "declarify" in my manuscript. I had used it without realizing that it isn't a standard word, but this turns out to be the case.

    The second comic is brilliant. I am going to keep this in reserve for the next time I get a lecture about the evils of euphemisms.

  13. David Morris said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 12:18 am

    In my legal publishing department, we occasionally depublish material.

  14. David Morris said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 12:19 am

    Or maybe we unpublish it. When I say 'we', I mean 'other people in my department'.

  15. Michael Watts said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 2:15 am

    If we spell "they" in its new sense as "thay," a written text can be made more exact. In a spoken context, I suspect most English speakers would pronounce the words identically.

    I would expect most English speakers presented with the written word "thay" to pronounce it /θeɪ/, not /ðeɪ/. /ð/ is something of a special-case consonant, particularly outside an intervocalic context.

  16. Philip Taylor said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 4:33 am

    Thertainly in dialogue, if one wished to communicate the fact that a thpeaker had a lithp, one might well mentally transcribe /s/ as /θ/ but typethet it as "th" — thus on reading "thay" the unwary might well believe that it represents a lisped "say" and pronounce the "th" as /θ/.

  17. Michael Watts said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 7:57 am

    Well, more than that, the set of words that begin with /ð/ is small and highly grammaticalized. There are other, more semantic words that begin with "th", but it represents /θ/ there.

    So it would be an extremely natural assumption that an unfamiliar word beginning with "th" is supposed to begin with /θ/. If it were a grammatical particle like most words starting with /ð/ (using a broad definition of "grammatical particle" that includes this and that), you'd already know the word.

  18. Andy Stow said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 9:35 am

    A couple of decades or so ago, someone invented and tried to popularize "pojundery" as a word to sign off a message with when one is not being sincere, thankful, or in love with the recipient.

    Pojundery,

    Andy

  19. Quinn C said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 1:10 pm

    I was confused by the example, because to me, English "I love you" lacks differentiation, being used between relatives as well as lovers, a no-no in my native German.

    My spontaneous interpretation of "deprove" was "show that a (mathematical) proof is incorrect/inconclusive".

  20. Philip Anderson said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 3:33 pm

    @Quinn C
    Deprove = disprove then.

    Politicians generally use the word “reform” when their changes make something worse; managers seem to call it process improvement regardless.

  21. Matt said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 3:34 pm

    Like Quinn, my initial interpretation of “deprove” was as a synonym to “disprove”, so I don’t think it will work as an opposite of “improve”.

    I have definitely already seen “unpublish” in the wild. I think it may be used by some blogging software to remove a previously published post from public view and and put it back into “Draft”.

  22. Matt said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 3:35 pm

    Philip beat me to the punch on “disprove” by mere seconds. I swear!

  23. Bloix said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 4:14 pm

    It's interesting how "poop," which used to be baby talk, is making its way into adult vocabulary.

  24. Bloix said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 4:14 pm

    It's interesting how "poop," which used to be baby talk, is making its way into adult vocabulary.

  25. Michael Watts said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 4:33 pm

    "Deprovement" sees spontaneous use within my family to mean the opposite of "improvement". "Deprove", not so much.

  26. Julian said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 4:54 pm

    @Thomas Lee Hutcheson: 'the differentiation of inside corner and outside corner would be nice, too.'
    If you look around any detail -rich environment, like an office or the inside of a car, you will be amazed by how quickly you start seeing things that there's no word for.

  27. Craig Ewert said,

    November 3, 2022 @ 10:49 pm

    I have been gone for years, and I had forgotten how much I love this blog.

    I love this blog.

    Je t'aime

  28. Philip Taylor said,

    November 4, 2022 @ 6:13 am

    "English badly need a word set meaning [speaker and to persons addressed/speaker and a third person(s)]" — or as I think of it, inclusive 'we' and exclusive 'we'.
    I encountered this need in real life yesterday evening, possibly for the first time in my 75 years. On arrival at a bowls match, I was told by the Club captain "we are playing first". Whether this meant he and I were playing first, or whether the whole Lostwithiel team were playing first, didn't seem to matter, so I took out my bowls and put them on the mat. "No," said Chris, "we are playing first". I must have looked puzzled. "So you should remove your bowls from the mat !". Suddenly all became clear — for Chris, in this context, 'we' meant he and others, not including the person whom he was addressing. Oh for 'wǒmen' (我们) and 'zámen' (咱们) in English !

  29. Rodger C said,

    November 4, 2022 @ 10:01 am

    Politicians generally use the word “reform” when their changes make something worse; managers seem to call it process improvement regardless.

    And then there's "upgrade."

  30. Philip Taylor said,

    November 4, 2022 @ 11:57 am

    … and "change management".

  31. David P said,

    November 5, 2022 @ 8:05 am

    It's never bothered me that my wife loves fish.

  32. Philip Taylor said,

    November 5, 2022 @ 3:09 pm

    It appeared to seriously bother my Canadian girlfriend when I said that I really fancied a Coke — she asked, incredulously, "You have sexual desire for a Coca-Cola ?!".

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