Seen on a web site discovered via Eal's 'friends of' list

[triskellian]

If we obsessively change all instances of the syllable 'man' to 'person', we have problems with a person called Guy Chapman. Do we call him Person Personperson?

This made me laugh really quite a lot.

The web page in question is http://baptism.co.nz/gram16.html, and he's written other articles on grammar. Being a fully paid up member of the grammar fascists, and a professional editor and proof reader, I enjoyed these anyway. But it was Person Personperson that made me laugh.

Comments

Similarly...

[venta.livejournal.com]

You're aware of Pendle, a hill in Lancashire ?

Well, Pendle is a corruption of Penn Hill, Penn being another word for hill anyway.

Sometimes people call it Pendle Hill...

Re: Similarly...

[triskellian]

That's the kind of thing that interests me, and simultaneously makes me want to hit people around the head with blunt objects ;-)

Re: Similarly...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

It's what you should expect, though, if people go around using foreign words, and lazily contracting two words to one, and so forth. Didn't ought to be alloed.