But of course two hours on stage is hard, and they do take a little break in the middle. At the end of a segment, the voice of one of the players comes over the PA from backstage:
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for intermission. Please intermiss.Hurrah! More verbing humor. I live for it. This plays on a really nice piece of English phonology and morphology. The 'sh' sound in words like mission, [ʃ], varies systematically, as linguist readers already know: we have transmission but transmissible (with [s]), but the verb is transmit. (Same basic patterns holds for permit, remit, and so on.) So, they are playing in rich territory.
This guy chose neither a simple cropping, to intermi[ʃ], nor the back-formation, to intermi[t]. None of these is a common English word (I assume few in the audience knew to intermit,'to discontinue'), so any is a potential candidate for playful invention, I figure. Intermish would sound odd, even to me, and you'd avoid that. But intermit would probably be to far removed for most people — a bookish joke at best, and you might have the vague sense that it's a word even if you don't know that word. Undoing the pretty directly phonological piece here ([s] becomes [ʃ]) felt natural, but going all the way to [t] (which seems pretty divorced from sound patterns to me — it feels more like something about word forms) apparently didn't.
Maybe that middle option is like Goldilocks' third bear said: "just right".
2 comments:
I remember a history and philosophy of science class that I was in a few years ago. We were discussing tension and, for some reason, the adjective that describes the state of being under tension completely eluded me. I was left mid-sentence to back-form it and probably by analogy with some irregular past-participle verb paradigm, I came up with tent. This only elicited looks of bewilderment and befuddlement from the rest of the class, then someone yelled "It's tense, dude!"
That's wild ... but a lot of us know firsthand what courses on the history and philosophy of science will do to a person's mind. I wonder if we could get that form to catch on?
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