Hoped you checked out the Spelling Bee last night. I happened to catch the end of it, but I'm told it didn't have any moments like this.And what's more interesting to me is not the talent (?) of the contestants, but the definitions of the words they're spelling. Take for example tmesis, used in the final round (and spelled correctly!):
Tmesis. Separation of the parts of a compound word by one or more intervening words. Tmesis.
Does this ever happen? I mean, you're writing a sentence, and you're thinking, hey, I need to employ tmesis here. That happens? Really?
The thing of it is: I noticed they stopped allowing kids to ask to have the word used in a sentence. Probably using words like icteritious and heiligenschein in sentences creates to much of a weltschmerz among the contestants.
6 comments:
if you look up tmesis on wikipedia, it turns out that people use it all the time and don't even know it. example: "this syntactical construction is used abso-fricken-lutely way too much without people knowing what it is called."
Works great with profanity!
Yes...but absolutely is not a compound word, thus, it's not employing the use of tmesis.
For example, in the newsroom, we hashed out back-a**-wards. But -wards, in the sense of backwards, isn't it's own word, thus it, as in your example, is not tmesis
You're right. To be more accurate, back-a**-wards and abso-fricken-lutely are not tmesis proper. They fall under a subset of tmesis called dystmesis (the web has way too much info). Perhaps that should have been the word in the spelling-%*@&#@!-bee.
ThIs Is GrEaT SpIlL It.
Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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