Month: February 2009

“bedroom suit”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I have heard this phrase a lot.

Problem:
It is not a “suit”!

Explanation:
What the heck is a “bedroom suit”?

For that matter, what is a “living-room suit” or a “dining-room suit”?

Okay, I am kidding.

I know what these phrases mean.

I know what the people who say or write them are doing.

They are mispronouncing or misspelling the noun that means a furniture set, most particularly the set of furniture necessary to furnish one room.

That noun is “suite” — NOT “suit”! Talk about NOT Hooked on Phonics.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “bedroom suit” — 9,980,000 matches
  • “bedroom suite” — 9,520,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the incorrect noun over the correct noun by a ratio of 1.05-to-1, which is horrible!

I believe that the favoring of “bedroom suit” over “bedroom suite” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to write and pronounce the four-letter, one-syllable “suit” than it is to write and pronounce the five-letter, 1.5-syllable “suite”.

Solution:
“bedroom suite”

Global Voice Translator

Foreign Languages

As I write this, it is Friday and time for some fun.

Go to the site for the new Pomegranate phone.

Oh my goodness. You have to see this thing!

The Pomegranate phone not only has everything that every other smart phone has today, it also includes a harmonica, a shaver, a coffee brewer, a projector, … and a global voice translator!

This thing rocks, and it makes me wonder when the Amazon Kindle will have all this functionality, too.

The makers of the Pomegranate — initially at model number NS08 — bill it as the ultimate all-in-one device, and I have to agree.

Even the accessories are awesome.

Be sure to click the “Release Date” button for the full scoop!

“gander”

Nouns

The noun “gander” is often heard in sentences such as “I’ll take a gander at it.”

I wondered about this use of the noun, so I checked a dictionary.

The primary meaning of “gander” is male of any goose species.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the slang use of “gander” to mean glance comes from the image of someone taking a long look, as if craning his or her neck like a goose (or sex-specifically a gander).

Apparently this slang use of “gander” was first recorded in 1887.

I then wondered why “gander” instead of “goose” — which specifically refers to the female of any goose species — became popular as the slang form of the noun “glance”, so I did some more research.

Apparently “I’ll take a goose at it.” did not have a chance because seven years earlier — in 1880 — the slang use of “goose” as a poke between the buttocks to startle first appeared.

Conclusion: Be sure you know your “goose” from your “gander” when using these words in slang!