APHAERESIS
Wild Word Friday!
When my 92-year-old father-in-law refers to electricity, he says ‘lectricity. The process of dropping an initial syllable when pronouncing a word is so common in human speech that it’s been given a name – APHAERESIS (uh-fur-eh-sus).
APHAERESIS – the word – may be totally unfamiliar to us in our everyday speech, but APHAERESIS – the process – has given the English language a lot of “new” words that we use all the time: like fender from defender, sport from disport, mend from amend, spy from espy and many others.
I think most of us have a tendency to take short-cuts. Last year my sister gave our dad a birthday card that said, “A shortcut is the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.” Yep, that’s my dad. I have a tendency to take shortcuts in my cooking and usually wind up with disasters. Isn’t it great that taking shortcuts in our speech habits has resulted in the enrichment of our language?
Q4U: What kinds of shortcuts do you take?
Blessings!
Sue
(Some information in this post from THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER NEW BOOK OF WORD HISTORIES. Photo from Wikipedia.)
Hello dear Sue,
Your word knowledge is outstanding.
In answer to your question, the word I would shortcut is ‘award’, as in, I have ‘warded you The Versatile Blogger ‘ward .. er .. award. 😉 If you go to the Jan. 22’12 post on my blog ( http://www.lynnadavidson.wordpress.com ) you will find details. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m sure I take shortcuts in my speech, the one I can think of right now is: specially, instead of especially. Does that one count?
Blessings on your day!
Lynn, thank you so much for the honor of the Versatile Blogger Award! I appreciate your encouragement and the joy of receiving it. And, I think ‘specially’ is a great shortcut!