Lellow and Elsh

As Catherine has learned to speak, she has corrected nearly all her early mispronunciations, but one that’s stuck is “lellow” (the colour of a banana). When I finally got round to googling this phenomenon, I found that Neal Whitman wrote quite a bit about it a couple of years ago. Googling also turns up Lellow as Alicia Keys’ nickname. I wonder how long it’ll take Catherine (who’s 4, by the way) to grow out of it? (We’re certainly not going to force her out of it.)

This month we went to Tenby on holiday, and after a couple of days she added a new word to her vocabulary: “Elsh” (the language and people of Wales). Criminally cute, and no sightings on Google.

Update: C is keen on Intrusive L. She says, for example, “Gelloff” for “Get off.”

F**k nominalisation

The current post on Language Log about uncountable nouns becoming countable reminded me, obliquely, of the usage “a swear”.

I told a kid off in class for saying “For God’s sake” or some such, and he complained that it “isn’t a swear”. I hadn’t heard “swear” as a noun before.

Hard to google for examples, but I did find a cartoon with “a swear” in the title (and it includes a variant of “could care less“):

Checking on dictionary.com, “swear” is in AHD4 as a noun, but not the other dictionaries.