Word: earful
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...more often, it becomes polished and more easily pronounceable. He cites "auto" for "automobile" and "I wanna go" for "I want to go" as obvious examples, and points out that among 100,000 connected words the term "master" occurs only 13 times, while the term "mister", familiar to the ear, therefore more lightly accented and less "conspicuous", occurs 148 times...
...that this new law of language applies to syllables as well as words. With mechanical accuracy the more common cases of inflected nouns in Sanskrit are accented on the stem, while less used cases, genitive and dative for example, are accented on the endings to aid the hearer's ear. "For man's tendency to laziness," says Zipf, "will prevent his accenting any element in language which his hearer will understand with cut accent...
...Baltimore, one Thomas Eunick, groping in a fog, waved his hand into the open mouth of a horse who closed his mouth, let go when Thomas Eunick shouted in his ear...
Useless to try to catch a bird by putting salt on its tail. But millions of Indians believe that the way to pacify a mad elephant is to have a camel bite it in the ear...
...goes into partnership with Farmer Kindred. His housekeeper falls in love with him, but he is too busy becoming a farmer to notice it, though he gives her much too much good advice about her worthless husband, and once even bites off the lobe of that worthy's ear in her defense. Mulliver is already committed to a farmer's lass; the housekeeper and her brutal husband disappear; the converted grocer marries the girl. It is a pleasantly rustic idyll, with enough quaint dialect to tickle good humor, just enough "real life" to emphasize the idyll...