Re: Cants

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:26:48 -0500, Greg Johnston
<greg.johnstons@...> wrote:

> For example, "cloff" (a mistyping of "cliff") has entered my
> vocabulary as "smaller than a cliff, but larger than a breadbox".
>
Yes. An interesting phenom. Words that have entered my typed vocab include
"tyop", "borked", "bitca" and "evol", and I've been known to knowingly
(mis)type "teh" from time to time, too, in the right company. Oddly, all
these words defy simply one-word translations, except "tyop", whose meaning
ought to be readily apparent. I shall try to provide brief descriptions, in
case anyone's interested.

Used in the right company (and if you can identify which company that is,
you get 1,000,000,000 bonus points)...

|teh| < |the| = "the only" or "the epitome of"

|borked| < |borken| < |broken| = "fundamentally flawed"

|bitca| from a TV show, a misheard letter-by-letter spelling of |bitch| =
very hard to describe. I think you have to absorb this one by osmosis.

|evol| < |evil| = something akin to "not truly evil, but not motivated by
good and pure thoughts, either", but that's not exactly it, either.

There are other terms in my 'lect (including |'lect| probably) that don't
turn up in dictionaries. I have never sat down and tried to make a
compilation of them. Maybe I shall. It might prove more useful than it had
previously seemed; maybe give me ideas for spots of semantic space that
ought be covered by my conlangs.





Paul