Blog 9- Spoonerisms

Spoonerisms occur when you switch the first letter of a word, with a first letter of another word in the same sentence, often making you feel pretty dumb. This happens to me most often when I am speaking rather quickly so all the words start to jumble together causing me to speak in spoonerisms. There are some people however, who intentionally speak in spoonerisms for comedic purposes. There is man that visits the Arizona Renaissance Festival every year, and his act is performing well known stories in spoonerisms. I have been listening to these stories since before I could understand what the heck this guy was saying because my parents think he is one of the funniest people ever. So without further ado, I present to you Zilch the Torysteller.

Little Red Riding Hood

Blog 8 - Dying Languages

I actually found a website this week that is completely dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages. It is set up so that speakers of that language can post audio clips, videos or even documents written in that language. According to the site, many of these languages are still at risk of being lost by the turn of the century. It makes me sad to think that with all the resources we have in the world at this point in time, we are still unable to share enough of these endangered languages to keep them alive.

This is a Video of Woman Speaking Taa that I found on that website. There are many more videos from different languages.

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

Blog 7- Slang

This week I found a video on slang. That thing that interests me about slang is how much a word or phrase can change over time to have a different meaning. Or how slang can change just by traveling to different parts of the country or world. This video is specifically about slang used for sex. I know there are TONS of euphemisms out there even now that don't really make any sense, but some of these phrases were so off the wall that I couldn't help but wonder how the heck someone came up with them. A few of my favorites are night psychic, play at rumpscuttle and clapperdepouch, and hootchie-pap.

Old Timey Phrases for Sex