Friday - January 06, 2012

Having Fun With Foreigners

Boldly stolen from Theo’s.

“The vicar’s vital victory was in the victuals” right? Or was it in the visuals? Never can remember.

Here is a complicated bit of doggerel to read out loud. It’s a bit of an extra challenge for us Yanks because we spell things differently. So rise to it and win the day. Pronunciation and Vocabulary Test. You should be able to pronounce and define all but the smallest handful of these words.

I’m a little light on my classic mythology learning, so I missed both Muses. I did not pronounce them properly and I did not know who they were. Heck, if I had to take a guess, I’d say that a terpsichorean ecdysiast was a mutli-theological preacher to turtles.

“fe0ffer” is a typo. They meant to write “feoffer”.  Easy to say, but a new word to me, as was paling, even though I’ve known the old expression “beyond the pale” for most of my life. I just never thought that it was an actual, physical thing. “Don’t lose your senses, it’s outside your demesnes”. But feoffer? If the ruler of a caliphate was beneficent and handing out land, and you were the passenger in car stuck in traffic behind his and the road was open and you really wanted to get ahead of him, would you seize the once in a lifetime chance to say to the driver “Please pass the sultan feoffer”? I would, in a New York Second.

Now go find your local EAS member* and have them read this poem aloud. Then try to explain why it’s humorous and yet not derogatory. Good luck with that.

* EAS - English Assassination Society, a term for people not from here who do their best to kill the language through wrong word choice, poor diction, worse spelling, broken meter, and imaginative grammar. The funny thing is, with a small bit of effort you can still understand them. English is quite robust that way. Which helps when someone tells you that he is of laughing in your feces.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/06/2012 at 01:45 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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