Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

A blog about words, wordplay, and etymology, with slightly more than occasional political rants.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

What word nerds do when they're grumpy

I'm not in a good mood, yo. It was a beautiful sunny day, I've got a great life, my cats have been extra cuddly, but for some reason I've been grumbling around all day whining and looking for reasons to pick fights.
Finally, though, I realized what would cheer me up. Onomatopoeias! I love me a good onomatopoeia, even though I spell it wrong every time I write it. So finding a Cracked.com article titled 10 Common Words You Had No Idea Were Onomatopoeias was good fortune.
I did not, in fact, know that cliche might be an onomatopoeia. Back in the 19th century, French printers started making single plates consisting of common phrases, which were called stereotypes. Cliche is the sound of the mold striking the molten metal. 
The French have a couple of other charming onomatopoeias, it seems. In France, roosters go cocorico (whereas they go ko-ke-kok-ko-o in Japanese and u-uru-uuu in Turkish). When the French kiss, they go mouah or smack (I would have thought that French kissing would be wetter - you know like om nom slurp slop). When they scream, they go aie, which I think is a lot more genuine than the English augh - dude, we can't even spell our onomatopoeias phonetically. Hell, we can't even spell phonetically phonetically. 

Get a load of that chicken!
Finally, one of the 500 chicken pictures I took in Key West
put to good use.

3 comments:

Lynn(e) Schmidt said...

I'm not gonna lie, the chicken picture made this post complete :)

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