Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 June 2

= June 2 =

funny military name
I need help choosing a humorous military-themed user name for a MMO game I like to play. I especially like the names that use the old joke of making a pun on a military rank such as "General Confusion," "General Grievance," or "Major Offensive". Was just wondering if someone could offer some ideas along those lines. Just brainstorming. Thanks!--Jerk of Thrones (talk) 07:27, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Private Parts. HiLo48 (talk) 08:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Colonel O'Truth. Corporal Punishment.  Marshall Law.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  08:58, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Major Pain. General Disorder. Hack (talk) 10:05, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not finding or figuring out any good ones for a Captain, Lieutenant or Sergeant - there's no ambiguity or homophony to exploit. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:44, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Bombadier Beetle? Captain Obvious? Gunner Sit-Right-Down-and-Write-Myself-a-Letter? AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:15, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Major Arsenal - X201 (talk) 15:46, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Major Major Major Major. -- Jayron  32  16:55, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The TV show How I met your mother has a recurring joke similar to this. Someone says "I got a major raise at work", and others respond by saluting the imaginary person "Major Raise". Here's some examples from the show, you can probably find more by googling . SemanticMantis (talk) 15:49, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Major A. Hole. StuRat (talk) 16:21, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Squadron Leader Leader . Martinevans123 (talk) 17:05, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Sergeant A. Tarms, Sergeant Major, Sergeant Shriver. Captain N. Tennille, Captain Kerr-Runch, Captain Capstan. Lieutenant [loo-tenant] LaTrine. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:35, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * General Mess and Private Mess, as in "The privates eat in the general mess, while the generals eat in the private mess." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ — Preceding undated comment added 19:37, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Colonel Mustered. Lieutenant Subletter. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:39, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I used to work for a company selling computers running Unix. I was at a meeting once where some stuff was being discussed in which we techies were concerned that something required by the customer (not unconnected with the Armed Forces) would require modification to the operating system kernel. After some discussion a rather naïve marketing lady asked very quietly "who is this Colonel Modz anyway?" Tonywalton Talk 23:09, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * For the British pronunciation: Lieutenant Rightenant MChesterMC (talk) 08:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Major General Verymodelov. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:12, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * For the benefit of anyone who didn't get the joke: Major-General's Song. Mitch Ames (talk) 09:50, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * You mean Major general Song, I suppose? Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:05, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds Russian: Веримоделов. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  09:10, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * This thread seems to have caused General Amusement. A collocations dictionary could help generate more ideas. 142.150.38.155 (talk) 15:59, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * What, nobody mentioned the Punnery Sergeant yet? And touching the Unix subject again, Colonel Panic? (who's on Windows now, and promoted to General Failure)? - ¡Ouch! (hurt me / more pain) 14:49, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Field Marshal Marshall? see this thread... Martinevans123 (talk) 15:01, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "almond"
I enjoy being pedantic. Usually I would be the one correcting others' pronunciations of words, but very recently the tables apparently got turned, and I found myself apparently mispronouncing the world "almond". I have lived considerably long and never once have I heard anybody pronounce "almond" without the "l". Yet the dictionaries indeed declare that "almond" is pronounced "a-mond". I do not quite believe it. Is the dictionary ever wrong? How exactly should it be pronounced? ☯ Bonkers The Clown  \(^_^)/  Nonsensical Babble  ☯ 15:26, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * My electronic copy of NOAD has the l as an option, so does Mirriam Webster, and so does Wiktionary . So I wonder what dictionary you're looking in? As for which pronunciation goes "first", that is a somewhat political matter, and each dictionary usually has a section discussing how their editors arrive at these choices. I personally have always said and heard the 'l' in 'almond', but it's sort of suppressed compared to e.g. 'All men.' If you listen to the examples at m-w.com, you'll see that the first and third (with and without 'l') sound very similar. I suspect there might be an AmE/ BrE issue at play as well, but I can't easily find any ref for that. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:39, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * p.s. dropping the l might be a form of hypercorrection, as "almond" comes from "amygdala". SemanticMantis (talk) 15:43, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * SemanticMantis -- The l-less pronunciations are older within modern English. The 1937 Daniel Jones UK pronouncing dictionary lists only [ɑːmənd], while the 1951 Kenyon and Knott USA pronouncing dictionary lists only [ɑːmənd] and [æmənd] as generally-accepted pronunciations (with [ælmənd] as a New England regionalism)... AnonMoos (talk) 22:06, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * You've quoted a few dictionaries there; the OED (online) has Brit.	 /ˈɑː(l)mənd/, /ˈalmənd/ , /ˈɒlmənd/ , U.S. /ˈɑ(l)mənd/ which seems to mean "either". Tonywalton Talk 22:56, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * If your comment is in reply to mine, then the answer is that I was looking where I would find information on what was considered the most standardly correct pronunciations 65-75 years ago... AnonMoos (talk) 09:14, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The etymology isn't directly from Greek, but from amygdala to L. amandula to French alemande and Spanish almendra, probably due to the influence of the Arabic al-. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=almond At some point in English since Chaucer (someone will know) the -alm- sequence lost the ell except in spelling, so that words like palm would rhyme with words like bomb.  The restoration of the ell based on spelling is called spelling pronunciation, it applies as well to things like the -t- in often which until recently was silent.  Hence older pedants insist on amond, while the rest of us blithely go on pronouncing the ell. μηδείς (talk) 17:02, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Say Hello, Wave Goodbye? Martinevans123 (talk) 17:11, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Hm, the spelling pronunciation article lists alm, psalm, etc as examples. But, if e.g. you pronounce "palm" as "pahm," and I say "pa/l/m", are we not both pronouncing the l in some sense? I mean, the pronunciation is different, but people who say "pahm" would not pronounce "pam" in the same way. I guess what I'm getting at is that the 'l' still has an effect on pronunciation, even if it is not vocalized as /l/. Do we have any articles that mention that concept? SemanticMantis (talk) 19:48, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * No, we're not pronouncing any kind of /l/ sound. We are using the historical spelling to indicate that the sound is different from what might be expected if the 'l' weren't there, just as in words with silent e. --ColinFine (talk) 21:11, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I think I've miscommunicated. If you say ah-mənd then you aren't saying any /l/ sound, but my claim is that you are making a sound for the letter l. (This would be easier if I actually knew the IPA). If I pronounce 'tortilla' as 'tor-TEE-ya', I would not say that I'm not pronouncing the l. I would rather say that I'm pronouncing the l differently than I do in e.g. 'lemon'. A similar example is 'button': whether I vocalize /t/ or just do a glottal stop, the letter t is being "pronounced" in a sense, in both cases, just with different sounds.  You say the l in almond indicates a different way of pronunciation than if the letter weren't there, and I agree. But how is that really any different than using a letter to indicate pronunciation in more phonetically transparent words? I feel like there must be some linguistic term for this, which is why I ask. I got to allophone for the 'button' example, but I'm not sure if that would apply to the two pronunciations of almond or not. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:47, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * So you're talking about more-or-less systematic patterns of spelling which represent particular pronunciations, but in the present language are completely arbitrary (though they may make sense historically)? No, I don't know a name for that. It would be picking out just one feature from the mess that is English spelling. --ColinFine (talk) 08:47, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * 'Palm' only rhymes with 'bomb' if you have both l-dropping and the cot-caught merger. Here in the UK there are plenty of people with neither. (I have l-dropping but no merger.) AlexTiefling (talk) 21:26, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Nope. I don't have the cot-caught merger (hotdog has two distinct vowels) and I rhyme bomb and palm.  I also rhyme orange and car-hinge. μηδείς (talk) 21:52, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * OK, I'm interested now. I don't treat the vowels of 'hotdog' as different, and once had great difficulty understanding an American who pronounced that exact word (to my ears) as somewhere around 'hutdug'/'hatdag'. What merger have I got that you don't, that conceals two different vowels in hotdog? AlexTiefling (talk) 21:57, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * The various splits and mergers of the low English vowels across British and NA dialects confuse me. All I can say is that I usue the same vowels in hot and cot as I do in dog and caught respectively, and the first pair is distinct from the second.  When Iwas young and lived in the South they used to have my mother say "hotdog" which they though was hilarious, since they used the cot vowel in both syllables.  My Nephews also show a merger, but in their case in New England the use the caught vowels in both cases. μηδείς (talk) 18:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Aha - now that makes sense. That's the sound that sounds to many English ears like 'dawg'. Some upper-class British accents have that split too; posh folk who say 'dawg' would never pronounce 'cot' as 'cawt'. Whereas to me the split very much puts hot, cot and dog on one side, and caught, bought, fought on the other. AlexTiefling (talk) 10:09, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, "dawg" for me would be a diphthong, like the name of Smaug as properly pronounced according to Tolkien. In any case, my low vowels from front to back are can (n.)/can (v.)/Khan/gone/crown, with crown being a diphthong. μηδείς (talk) 19:01, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * AlexTiefling -- the pronounced [l] in "palm" dropped out several centuries ago, and the pronunciation of this word without an [l] sound was presumably part of the common ancestor of all forms of current standard English; this doesn't have much to do with recent l-vocalization... AnonMoos (talk) 22:06, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I do sometimes hear the l pronounced in 'palm' - presumably this is a hypercorrection? AlexTiefling (talk) 22:09, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I think pronouncing /l/ in palm is a spelling pronunciation, as indicated by Medeis and Angr above and below. SemanticMantis (talk) 23:52, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The standard joke among people in and around the California almond industry is that they're called "all-monds" when they're on the tree, but "ah-monds" after they're harvested, because to harvest you "shake the 'ell out of them". --jpgordon:==( o ) 17:25, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I believe the ag community in California's Central Valley pronounces it /æmənd/ rather than /ɑːmənd/ ("cat" vowel in the first syllable). A lot of them migrated from Oklahoma and like places during the Dust Bowl, and their accent has not yet really mingled with that of coastal California. --Trovatore (talk) 19:54, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * That's fascinating. I heard the distinctive accent when I was last in the Central Valley, and wondered at the time where it had come from. Thank you! AlexTiefling (talk) 21:26, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * the linguistics nerd in me feels obligated to tell you that the correct pronunciation of words is dictated by how people pronounce them. Where I live it's "ah-monds". But I'm sure the "all" pronunciation is used in other areas. Bali88 (talk) 18:06, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Down here, it's always ah-mənd and pahm, not to mention buoy is an exact homophone of boy. Anyone who says the el in the first 2 words, or sounds the u in buoy reveals they've been exposed to at least some novomundane influence.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:04, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * In the American Midwest I've always heard and said it as "AHL-munds", "PAHLm", "HOLmes", etc. But we do pronounce "would" as a homophone of "wood". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:25, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Here's an ad produced by the Blue Diamond company and presumably approving of its pronunciation of "almonds". I hear an L in it. Does everyone else? Or no? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:18, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * No. It's more like they suddenly switch to a Boston Brahmin accent for just that word, but I could not swear on a Bible that I hear an el. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:26, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * but would you swear on a Bibe? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:37, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I think whether a "true" /l/ is present is somewhat subjective, and different ears will draw different conclusions. Hence such a confusing and interesting thread! SemanticMantis (talk) 23:54, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with Bali88 that "the correct pronunciation of words is dictated by how people pronounce them". Neither the l-less pronunciation "ahmond" nor the l-ful pronunciation "all-mond" is "right" or "wrong", but the l-less pronunciation is older than the l-ful one; the pronunciation with the /l/ is a more recent spelling pronunciation. The same is true for several other words spelled with -alm- such as calm, palm, and psalm. There's nothing wrong with spelling pronunciations—some of them have become the only standard pronunciation—but it's good (IMO) for people who use them to be aware that they are using them, and not to make fun of people who use the traditional pronunciation (I'm speaking to you, you Brits who pronounce the /h/ in herb and make fun of Americans who drop it; and to you, people from Northern states who pronounce the /h/ in humble and make fun of Southerners who drop it; and to you, my mother who used to berate people for saying Artic instead of Ark-tic). Angr (talk) 21:33, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Southerners drop the h in humble??? So it's like "umble"? I've lived in a lot of places and have never come across this! Bali88 (talk) 23:35, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * There is a word "umbel" (umbel; http://www.onelook.com/?w=umbel&ls=a).
 * —Wavelength (talk) 23:45, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Hmmm...that links to a flower. Bali88 (talk) 01:53, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, some Southerners drop the h in humble. Not all do. And I think the h-less pronunciation may be rather old-fashioned nowadays even in the South. Angr (talk) 13:37, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Just to complicate things a bit, there's also the Almond, which runs through Cramond near Edinburgh, of course, although obviously with a different etymology. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:38, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * To add to my previous statement, much of what we consider incorrect pronunciation is actually just hearing someone speak in another dialect. Things like "axe" instead of "ask" fit into this category. The only things that are actually incorrect are when a specific person has a weird pronunciation that doesn't fit any cultural speech pattern. What we typically think of as "correct" speech is just the common parlance of the upper class. When someone says "Don't axe no questions", that's actually correct for their dialect. We only think it's incorrect because we view the people who speak like that as being from a lower social class. There is no rhyme or reason why one set of grammatical rules is correct and another is incorrect aside from us being elitist snobs who think that poor people are icky. Our view that our way of speaking is objectively correct is furthered by taking English classes in school where we're taught that our speech is correct and other ways are just "poor grammar". Bali88 (talk) 01:50, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Salmon is simiar. Engish is a weird anguage.Joepnl (talk) 02:41, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * For many of my fellow antipodeans, there is no el in Australia. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  04:36, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * And "there's no f in Union". Martinevans123 (talk) 07:37, 3 June 2014 (UTC)