Fake English - 29 October 2012

<p>Everyone knows you don't start a sentence with "But." But why? We sort out the confusion over this little word. Also, how voice recognition technology is changing the way we think and write, and what English sounds like to foreigners. (Hint: It's not pretty.) Plus, where cockamamie comes from, oddly translated movie titles, trucker slang, patron vs. customer, hashtags, pungling, paralipsis, and more.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Quiz time! Does pungle mean a) a baby platypus, or b) a verb meaning "to put down money."  It's the latter. The term pungle is most common in the Western United States. It comes from the Spanish pongale, an imperative meaning "put it down." For example, you might pungle down cash at a poker table or a checkout counter.<br /><br />Michelle, a middle school teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, says her students believe they've invented a new word for "an injury received from a fist bump or dap." They say they created fistumba as a combination of fist and Zumba, the popular dance exercise. They're wondering how to improve their chances of spreading this new word, and they've been discussing the children's book Frindle, by Andrew Clements, which is about inventing and trying to popularize a new term.<br /><br />"We don't want to dwell on the need for your donations, so we'll stop talking about how important they are." Rhetorical statements like this one, where the point is actually made by pretending to avoid it, is often called paralipsis or paraleipsis. The terms come from the Greek word meaning "to leave aside."<br /><br />In truck driver slang, a bedbugger is "a moving van that hauls furniture." That's one example of trucker lingo that Martha picked up during her appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio's call-in program, The Ben Merens Show.<br /><br />Kathleen from Hebron, Connecticut, is curious about the term hashtag. She associates it with the symbol #, which she calls a pound sign. When that symbol, also known as a hash mark, pound sign, doublecross, hatch mark, octothorpe, or number s