Tuesday, November 01, 2011

How's your viscus feeling today?

I know Mr. Verb is all about, you guessed it, verbs, but here's a cool adjective blend I heard on the radio yesterday: "I had a gutteral reaction to it." Isn't that awesome? "gut reaction" + "visceral reaction" = "gutteral reaction."

2 comments:

Fritinancy said...

I've seen this error--yes, seen in print--frequently enough that a couple of years ago I considered writing about it myself. Here's an example from a New York Times Sunday Magazine story about Kabbalah; three and a half years later, it still hasn't been corrected:

"The proceedings grew weirder as they went along, with a lot of football-huddle sort of male bonding interspersed with hora dances, gutteral noises and a talk by one of the chevra that ramblingly connected the weekly Torah portion with some aspect of goodness or spirituality."

Link: http://nyti.ms/sbBL6i

Harry Campbell said...

But of course "gutteral noises" is just a (very common) spelling mistake, not a blend error or malapropism like Monica's example.